Sit down for a moment commenters, we need to talk.
Yes, you all knew this post was coming one day. We’ve talked about this topic at length internally, and we have decided that we’re going to clean up our act. For some time, Hack a Day has been growing a reputation as the prime source of extremely negative, vulgar, rude, sexist, and inflammatory comments in the hacking community. We’ve had complaints from readers (yes there are readers that aren’t commenters, thousands of them) and fellow members of the hacking community about this problem for a long time. [Eliot] even mentioned it back in 2009 when a job applicant expressed concern. We’ve nicely tried to steer things to the positive in a variety of ways, from suggesting commenters to be more supportive, jokingly making a troll detector, and simply stating that the comments need to stay “on topic and nice”.
When we see things like these tweets by [Jeri Ellsworth], we hang our heads in shame.
She’s not the only one. We actually get this quite regularly. As our readership grows, we see it more and more often. We get emails explaining that people have done a hack but don’t really want to post it because the commenters will just tear it apart in an unnecessarily aggressive and negative way. We have actually had people ask us to remove their projects and comments due to uncivil behavior. Constructive criticism is good, but insulting and angry deconstruction isn’t helpful to anyone.
We’re better than that aren’t we? We are fast, agile and fairly unrestricted in our content. We should be at the center of this community, not on the outer edges, reviled by many for the behavior of a few. Hackaday should be the teacher at the front of the classroom, not the kid in the back throwing wadded up paper at the kids in the front.
What we’re doing:
First off, as far as we can foresee, we will never close the comments section of our web site down. Hackaday should be a home for the entire hacking community and as such, you will always be able to settle in and have a reasonable discussion. We do not want to implement any sort of G+ integration or similar, nor do we want to require registration to leave a comment. We will if we absolutely have to, but lets try to avoid that.
Comment sections and forums have often been a place where negative comments can get out of hand. There are many theories for why this happens, but the result is usually the same: rules and moderation. Many sites have already laid down the law and are adhering to their goals of keeping things civil. We realize that we are to blame if our image is this poor, so we are doing something about it.
From this point moving forward, Hackaday comments will be civil. If you are posting an empty in-joke (“where’s the Arduino?”), a declaration of “not a hack”, a racist, sexist, completely off topic, platform-hating, or personally insulting comment, your post will be deleted. This will be at the discretion of whichever Hackaday staff member happens to see your comment first.
Can you criticize Hackaday?
You can’t walk into a business and start screaming about how much they suck without being escorted out immediately. Same thing applies here.
We are always hard at work trying to find interesting hacks, makes, repairs, tweaks, videos, etc. that appeal to a wide spectrum of readers. We put this web site together for you, as well as 200,000 other individuals. Not everything will appeal to everybody. That would be impossible. However, if you don’t like a post or project, just skip it – we’ll have another one ready in short order. We will feature projects that appeal to the seasoned EE as well as the complete beginner. We were all beginners at one time, and it would have been great to have something like Hack a Day around back then to show us hacks ranging from simple to advanced.
From time to time however, Hack a Day can be a less than desirable place to hang out, especially for those who are coming here for the first time. We don’t want to chase off young, creative minds. As a community, we should be helping those that are just starting to venture into hacking electronics.
If you have a problem, email us. You’ll probably actually get a response that way too. My email is Caleb@ and you’re always welcome to email me personally. Again, please be civil (yep, I’ve had my share of death threats).
Grammar/spelling corrections and dead links:
No need to comment, just email us. A message to team@ will suffice, but you will probably get a quicker response by emailing the author directly. We know we have issues – we’re often so excited about a hack that some little goof slips by. Email us and we’ll fix it. Don’t write a 3 paragraph comment about how important the oxford comma is, or how we’re obviously incapable of functioning because we accidentally flubbed a word. We promise we will never intentionally screw up some grammar, spelling, or punctuation.
What you can will do to help:
Be constructive.
Every project here probably has an area that could be improved, or a part that was done inefficiently. Support your fellow hackers by offering your expertise. Explain why something isn’t working, or how you would improve it. Don’t slam them for their shortcomings. Also keep in mind that different people go about things different ways. Poster X didn’t build something the way you did? Offer an alternative without being insulting. If someone chooses to use their brand new Core i7 monster system to drive a few LEDs, that’s their prerogative. Inside, we all know that it is not the most efficient use of money or technology, there’s no reason to beat that dead horse in public.
You know what else encourages hackers to do more projects? A pat on the back. I talk to people all the time who say that they just don’t have any constructive criticism for the projects, so they don’t comment. Well, that and they know they’ll bring the ire of the worst commenters if they happen to ask a silly question. Drop in and say what you like about a project. Those positive posts might just be enough to encourage that hacker to take it a step further. How many projects have you seen dropped simply because people thought there wasn’t any interest? Tons. If you like a project, let them know.
To encourage this, the writers are going to be keeping an eye on the comments. Randomly, when we see someone being exceptionally helpful, we’ll contact them and send them a prize. This will most likely be in the form of a hackaday sticker, but we’ll see if we can’t find some other fun things as well.
Help us make Hack a Day great. Please.
[Update: we’re working on a comment flagging system currently]
[Update: threading and comment reporting have been added]
@bob
erm, no. that’s great that you did incredibly stupid things as a 6 year old, and that got you started in hacking. Really, it is. But it doesn’t need to be *here* especially when it’s a bad example. If HAD becomes about the people (and there does seem to be a bit of a love-fest over Jeri around here…), and not the hacks, I’ll be visiting a lot less often. I visit cnn.com about…once a month? HAD, usually 5-10 times a day, just checking for new stuff.
Also, this site gets about 150k visits a day…that’s pretty trivial in terms of modern hardware. I’d be cool with hosting the site, and not using effing wordpress, in order to get a decent comment hosting system.
I have to agree with those saying that this is a good thing. I have seen countless nasty posts in the comments here and, even, sexist comments whenever a post happens to have come from a female hacker (including one from a member of my hackerspace. However, there is a part of me that is a little frustrated that, literally, years of complaints about this had to happen before it got dealt with and I’m a little sad that it was only after someone the site has a personal connection with was the target of the abuse that anything was done (the Adafruit attack thread from yesterday).
From this post it seems to me that you are going from too little to too much. By all means clean up anything hateful or abusive but if you act as comment Nazis you will drive away your audience.
Good! The comment section here is absolutely pathetic with self righteousness and smugness.
Not to mention the assholes that have to slam every link they see just so they can show off their “superior” intellect.
I hope those people are seen as trolls under the new policy.
I dont think they have to go as far as “if you have nothing nice to say dont say anything at all” but more of a “If you are just going to be a negative asshole please kindly STFU”
@Aleks Clark totally reminds me of the debacle that led to http://xenisucks.com/ because a certain person that wanted attention got too much and her “brand” cough ada cough was diminished. The parallels aren’t exact, but try busting Pescovitz’s hump when he has a book of impressionistic Hanna Barbera fish-lamps and you’ll be disemvoweled so fast lol. I’d donate a few bucks to help ya host it if it meant I could read both sides of an argument.
Bout time! It will be good to see people not get their works attacked. Does this also extend to people who complain, “its too hard, its too easy, I cant use it, I dont have the time/money/skills to do this” in otherwords people who just go after it because it is a hack they can not use or do themselves?
Why not give them a chance and see where it goes? I don’t think they are trying to be the comment police, but just want to tone things down a little.
Yes, some people here are full of themselves and their PHD/MS/whatever. Some people are just brutally honest. Then there are the trolls who have nothing better to do than be evil, foul mouthed, hatred spewing knuckle heads just because they think it’s fun. The last group are the ones I think HaD Wants to part ways with, because No body likes a hater. Will it be all out censorship? I doubt it. But give them a chance and see where it goes, if they start book burning then leave….
I’ve posted a lot of projects on HaD and at first it caused me some anxiety to see my work ripped apart by jerks, but over time it allowed me to grow a thicker skin. I started thinking of HaD as the ultimate litmus test of whether my project was good or not. If there were no flames on HaD, then I must have done a good job. HaD was like running the gauntlet.
I think I’ll miss some of the brutal humor, but I respect and welcome this new direction. Why? Because it’s your site! You get to make the rules as you see fit. Thanks for your good work.
I agree with the goal, but this implementation is really bad. I’ll echo the idea that if you delete a comment you need to, at minimum, provide some indication that a comment was deleted. When you just make them vanish, you don’t steer a commenter onto the right path – you just drive them away.
Consider, for example, a hack that uses an arduino for control where smaller/cheaper electronics could have been used instead. If someone comments that the arduino is expensive, and to let the poster know that a 5-5-5 would do the job for a fraction of the cost, are they going to be deleted for arduino-hating? Even if the intent of the comment was a constructive criticism of the design (complete with a suggestion of what to use instead). If that commenter just has their thread deleted, the message they get is that HAD just doesn’t want their comments, and they’ll go elsewhere. If they find their message gone, and a “Message deleted for TOS violation” in its place, they’ll gripe a bit and add a little diplomacy to their re-post.
Thank you HaD! It got to the point that I would just look at the pictures, skim the body and then see if there was information anywhere else. It seems like people really like to abuse HaD’s really open policy about commenting. I’m personally a big fan. I’m a member of some forums that have such strict access control that sometimes I feel like I am a bot – because as a human, I can barely defeat their captcha and authentication system. Good on ya, HaD! I really hope this works and brings HaD to the front of the class ( or at least a few rows forward in the class, lol!).
I am not a fan of censorship, but I am a fan of HaD. I read many of the projects and have commented on a few. I am not a Hacker but I use the site as a learning experience, to broaden my views, and help me think out side of the norm (or box, or whatever). When someone posts a negative comment, I read it with a grain of salt and take away what I can. That said, there have been a few comments that I have not read all the way through because of the negative content. I get what HaD is doing and I do think that the trolls should be put in there place.
HaD, I tip my hat to you for standing up for what you feel is right and in the best interest of the site, and I will continue to be a frequent and regular visitor/reader to the site.
Hack on folks.
I just wanted to lend my support to HAD’s decision. This is way overdue.
In my opinion, moderation costs the site money or effort, since moderators will either be paid staff or volunteers (who can burn out, or would otherwise work on something else for the site).
Hopefully moderation works. If not, I totally support account, but ONLY if real names are NOT required AND third-party account authentication is supported (OpenID/Facebook/Google, and once authenticated you get to pick a semi-anon HAD handle).
I am convinced that most of the trolls here really DO value this website.
Trolls may act otherwise, but that’s because they are jealous social misfits, or simply used to being snarky asses towards people they have never met. Some may think like trolls in real life, around people, but real life forces them to (mostly) not ACT like trolls or they will be shunned, punched, or unable to network with their peers. Manners are not just an ideal, but something we impose on each other because it helps get things done without distractions.
As a long time reader with projects which have been featured here, I applaud this move in comment policy.
No one is going to try to do anything neat or innovative if all they receive is destructive criticism. Hopefully this will be a lasting change and bring more people into the community.
Good job. I get pretty tired of folks cutting other folks down and complaining about one thing or another. It seems to be modern-day human nature to gain pleasure by insulting others.
Doing this massive article was a mistake
You just fed the trolls and haters by letting them know they got to you.
Jeri, your an attractive (hott) intelligent woman. Why let simple minded trolls bring ya down?
Why is anyone taking the trash talk seriously?!? Lets go call the waaambulance.
Survival of the fittest, if your going to crawl in a hole, cry, and give up becuase of “mean peoples comments” the go ahead. Learn to take a hit, shrug it off and continue.
WAAAAAAAAA people didnt like my hack, what am i ever going to do.
GROW UP!!!! and get a set
Thank goodness. The little boys can go be abrasive somewhere else.
@c3p: you’re probably right about Umgangsform. Most everywhere you have to defend your work against all kinds of what they call “negativism” here, and that’s how the good stuff emerges. Here it used to be the same but now we will have to be sweety-sweety-constructive-fantastic-job about everything.
The valid point though is that the authors of articles normally don’t ask the authors of works if they want to be published or not. And again and again this puts all the blame on the editors and not the readers. Do not publish stuff that does not fit in your profile. Know your audience. Leave basic projects to other blogs, they are a plenty and you know them. What gets called crap here is great in some other place.
I’m still curious about those racist, sexist and other -ist comments that, according to this post, envenom this blog beyond recognition. Where are they? I read HaD every day for many years and I tend to browse through the comments: especially lately they have more useful or interesting insight on the subject than the articles written in gizmodish tongue in cheek style. Where are the offending ones? Where are those “attacks that rip the projects apart”? Hell, what is sexism? It’s something that only exists in USA, but I want to see this. Where?
As for people being tired of reading the “hate mail” WAAAAAAAAAA!! skip over and find a constructive one.
Ive gone after the haters in comments and have brought some to the light of their mistakes.
People need to correct the a-holes and not just seperate or censor them. If you havnt noticed, censorship hasnt done shit for society. (lady gaga anyone?)
People need to be beat into seeing there wrong or the path will continue and spread.
One last statement. If you post a hack to just get attention in posts. Your pathetic. If you cry to have your removed becasue of idiots commenting. Your even more pathetic.
Just delete my comment becasue its chalk full of reality you dare not want to accept.
Everyone seems to acknowledge mother nature as a concern for you up comming youth, but not human nature.
If you dont understand why people would want to be seperated from the trolls you just might be one.
For those hating this.
1. being mad that people will no longer be able to troll is something one may expect a troll to do.
2. Why cant there be some place on the internet the promotes the best of humanity instead of the worst.
3. The owners of hackaday are the owners of hackaday.
4. If you dont like it, dont troll. there are a ton of places for trolls to go to. WoW and bridges come to mind
It can be hard to keep the diversity of the audience in mind, some people are used to a more ‘robust’ way of talking where others are not.
A kid (11 or 12 maybe) once told me he didn’t visit a place I was moderating because there was too much rudeness and snarky stuff, and I knew there was but at a level that was acceptable for a 15+ crowd but because of that remark I realized it was excluding a group for who it was suppose to be accessible, it’s just hard to realize that you deal with all kinds of people that are quite different from you and your world.
Same goes for the other way round of course, a kid moderator would not quite get that lots of stuff that’s normal for those a little older is rather unsettling for him/her.
But if you stifle one group to assist the other you lose the group you stifle.
So I guess the trick is to keep things around a point where the attitude is more one of a person that is aware he’s in mixed company and doesn’t push things too far, and that’s what I might call civil.
It´s easy for the masses to negative crittic(and therefore destroing) than Create even from critics.
DESTROY si eassy even for the more ignorant being…
CREATE needs another kind of people¡¡¡
You decide where you want to be¡¡¡
Maquiavelo said Once:
-Count on masses is like writting on water…Stupid.
So I never count on spirit poor and non sense little being.
I don´t even hear them.They are completly out of my life.
I know they (non sense) need to say anything to feel participate in world…Sad image of them.
So I prefer to position me in my own way.
Un Saludo…
PS(English is obviously not my natural language)
YAY. I love this site, it’s good to see that the law is finally being laid down. I understand everyone has an opinion… Sometimes it’s just better unexpressed.
I’ve been reading for several years now and while I’ve noticed a few trolls here and there, I can’t recall ever seeing anyone being particularly sexist. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen because I don’t read every article by any means, much less all the comments.
That said, you should do what our yahoogroups mailing list does. Every new member gets put on moderation. After a time of proving they aren’t utter newbs/jerks, we let them off of moderation. If they screw up on a minor point, we put them back on moderation, at least temporarily; if they screw up big time, they’re banned.
Haven’t read the other comments.
So you don’t want criticism but the ad-viewing users should make this site great by spell-checking your commented abstracts of other peoples work and praising everything, even if it’s trivial (=not a hack)?
I think I should start my own site. If you can afford to hire people, this must get lots of paid impressions.
How about Hack-A-Day just collects the comments and makes the polite ones viewable.
I also hope constructive citicism is allowed.
But i hope i never have to read
Twitter/Skipp:
“The small quantity of men who manage to be absolute pigs are overwhelmingly overrepresented on hackaday.com.”
ever again.
Wow, haven’t read all the reactions here, but I’m glad to hear about this. Sometimes the comments are amusing, but for sure a lot of time they are indeed all “oh, you should have done it this way” and such comments are usually posted anonymously (ie, probably by someone who doesn’t have anything to share/show in return).
The needlessly nasty comments are actually one of the reasons I never gave the forums a chance, I just assumed it would be similar activity in there.
Will be curious to see how things evolve around here.
I’m with you, except that I will miss the empty in-jokes.
Haters gonna hate.
Hackers gonna hack.
What will YOU do? :)
I’m jumping on to say “jolly good show, old boy”.
In some craft communities there are offshoot snark boards. Generally they are kept quiet and don’t engage in public attacks. I have been snarked (and subsequently defended by friends who are members there). It seems to be one answer to letting people blow off some steam while allowing a positive public place with constructive criticism. What goes on the snark sites stays there. I think there might be some call for that in the tech community for those who can’t bear to see another stuck a led in a development board and made it blink post.
But for here, I can empathize with HAD being embarrassed to be thought of as a negative place. It’s not what they want and they are laying down the new tracks for building a different community. A community that I want to be part of.
For the “Grow a Pair” commentators, what did you hope to accomplish with your negative comments? You might have a point, but presented in a way that it’s not worth the time to sort out the technical aspects from the bitterness. A lot of the posts here seem to really miss the point or objective the creator has. Anything done for simply learning or having artistic merit really goes over a lot of heads. We are all in it together and it’s not a survival of the fittest. Not that armchair engineering has any fitness points compared to actively making.
I find the people doing awesome things just don’t have the time to criticize others.
Wow, over 400 comments, guess mine has pretty much zero chance of being read but what the hell…
I would suggest two things. Firstly find a better comments system that is self regulator. Look at the system Slashdot uses (it is open source). It is moderated both by site admins and the users themselves and can cope well with a large or small number of comments. Troll quickly get filtered out and the debates, while heated, tend to stay relevant and away from mere name calling.
Secondly to the commenters: I noticed a lot of people like to belittle the subject’s achievements by making out that they could have done it easily. Well, you didn’t, so either do something better or shut up. Constructive criticism is one thing but Ellisworth is right, even clever and interesting hacks get a lot of flak from people who seem to just love talking everyone else down. I noticed this happens in some graphics programming forums, usually when people describe complex and time consuming tasks as “trivial” and lay into anyone who didn’t meet their high standards, yet curiously never seem to produce much themselves. We should celebrate cool hacks, not mock them.
For a while the HAD editors went off the rails and to my mind that is when things went really down hill. By keeping the posts more professional and well written HAD now deserves to be taken seriously… Although the 1996 site design could still do with a make-over. If you create a good site people will behave better on it.
I nearly gave up on HAD and rarely read the comments. Even when there are only 20 or so the lack of threading makes it hard to follow the discourse. I’m glad you guys are making an effort to improve things.
Finally! Thanks, HaD – this was way overdue. Let’s all work together on making this the best hacking site online!
oh no terror.. I mean trolls hate our freedom
I am a long time lurker (read: 2004-now) and very occasionally leave comments.
All of the stuff they mention here has been going on for a while now. I have seen comments posted then suddenly missing, with obvious gaps in the discussion (usually responses to said comment).
So, everyone can stop crying about the new iron fist of hackaday since it has been here all along.
I do think that they should have published these criteria a long time ago, but better late than never.
At the end of the day, if you do not like it go somewhere else. You will likely not be missed. I occasionally skim the comments but usually skip them as they are often annoying to trudge through.
I remember hackaday in its infancy. I was not around for the first few months of hacks, but I did some digging and was well chuffed at what I found.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
Hackaday post #3: “make a nintendo controller in to a usb joystick”
I have not edited the title. “into” was broken into two words. No one bitched about the grammar.
That aside what did that post look like?
It featured (and brace yourselves) a $16 kit for a Nintendo controller that let you connect it to your PC.
Oh. My. GOD! That would be shit upon like most other things are today, but back then it was just fine.
How about another?
——————-
Captain’s log 2004/09/16: “put the roomba robotic vacuum in test mode”
Another holy shit moment for rocket scientists here. Turning the Roomba on while holding 3 buttons?
I can hear the echoes of “not a hack” from here.
——————-
Star date 2004/09/18: “add a cigarette lighter to a pc”
Wait, wait. Add a 12v car accessory to a computer that uses 12v rails?!?!
MIND ABSOLUTELY BLOWN!!!!!1one
—————–
2004/09/28: “replace the ipod battery”
The hacking, it astounds!!! OH WAIT, it’s a repair? NOT A HACK! NOT A HACK! AVERT YOUR EYES FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD!
—————–
2004/09/27: “mod the keypad and leds on phones”
Putting smd leds where smd leds already existed. Need I say more?
——————-
2004/10/04: “bottlecap tripod”
A tripod made from a pop bottle and a couple of items from the hardware store. Tell me what is more involved? This or blinking lights on an Arduino.
Hint: only one of these uses electricity!
So, after all of my half-coherent rambling here is my point.
Hackaday has ALWAYS been a mixture of hacks electronic and otherwise that appeal to different skill levels. There were some great hacks then as well as some lame ones. The only catch was that there was only a single hack per day. If today’s hack sucked, you had to wait 24 hours for another…which could also suck.
I am not putting down the work of PT, because after all he is the father of hackaday. I am merely pointing out that the more things change the more they stay the same. This place has always been an amalgam of different technology, hacks, fixes, and even kludges since day #1. To claim that the quality has gone down is stupid, simply put.
Now you get 6,8,10 hacks a day. I am one happy guy! I read what interests me and I skip the rest. Nearly every single day I find at least one hack that appeals to me…
a Hack a Day, if you will.
The Internet is not everything free all the time, despite what people think. Hackaday is a business. As you can see, PT does not run it any more. It was put in other hands over the years, and is now owned by a big company that also owns other sites. It is run…as a business.
More ‘hacks’ per day means more clicks, means more money. So they feature stuff that is ‘not a hack’ in your eyes, big deal. It’s always been that way, there are just more hacks and non hacks now.
Get over it.
If you don’t like it or you can’t behave in the comments, find another place to be obnoxious. I hear 4chan is always looking for more trolls!
Thank you. The negativity gets awfully old.
Just wanted to add my 2 cents:
I definitely agree that many of the comments were negative or useless posts. To all of you who constantly complain that something is “not a hack” and threaten to leave the site and never contribute anything positive, don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
That being said, I think it is worth listening to some of the good ideas people have brought up about different comment systems. This thread already has over 400 comments, way too many to read through in any reasonable amount of time, and nearly impossible to follow when you have several people responding to each other. Some sort of threading / moderating system like slashdot or youtube would go a long way in making the comments more useful. Instead of deleting comments it would be better to hide them, or let people up/down vote them and hide all below a certain threshold. Deleting comments gets annoying when people have responded to that post and now the original is gone.
Another big concern is that I don’t want people to self-censor themselves when they have something to contribute because they’re worried that their opinion is unpopular and could be deleted. Please take care to only remove the inflammatory comments, we want things to be civil, but not homogeneous. Our strength is in our diversity, and that should be respected.
Overall, keep up the great work! I visit this site almost every day and get a lot of knowledge and inspiration out of the many different projects you post in a wide variety of subject areas.
This is a good move. Thank you. Don’t mind the haters.
Oh, no! No more “she is HOT” comments on girls’ hacks? :-D
But, anyway, that’s good initiative. Hack A Day is for hackers, not trolls. But what should we do, if she is really hot? :-)
About time. The few times I’ve commented, and been alerted to followup comments, I’ve been appalled. Worse than SomethingAwful and Fark.
@Rohit Mahajan
Posting crap like “Marry me, Jeri” is creepy as hell and you should be ashamed
@sM10sM20
When a woman submits a project here, they expect comments on the quality of their work, not comments on how hot you think their body is. It’s sexist, creepy, and objectifying.
@beeboue
Haha, your comment is laughable. Yes, rant more about the “good old days” when you could spew disgusting bile out of your mouth with impunity. Ah, those golden years! LMAO
@Mad Max
There is no such thing as “political correctness” — it’s a term made up by right-wingers and bigots to whine about how they’re not allowed to openly be nasty to others.
GTFO please
@G-Reg
“Jeri, your an attractive (hott) intelligent woman.”
Keep it in your pants (and GTFO too)
@ its the internet, deal with it. Nothing says you have to be a jerk or that others have to deal with it. Also by said logic, it also means that thoses who own the servers,sites, ect have as much right to delete what others post as posters have to post.
I’ve been following this site ever since it has started up, it is quite a shame seeing how the comments section has evolved over time.
@octel Before the new rules start you might read the part that says “…or personally insulting comment, your post will be deleted.”
And I remind you that you aren’t the tsar here and that a fear of women is not generally considered a virtue.
Mind you, some of those you target have the same attitude and also think they are the owners of this site so I guess you are playing an equal playingfield.
Nice to see that my comment about ad revenue was deleted. Cheers.
I’ve noticed a general devolution, not just here. When I turn on my computer I check 3 websites, this one and HardOCP. Over at H I used to value the comments, posted by intellectually superior people, but in the last few months its become a bashfest full of spite, whats going on ??
I actually read 90% of the comments before posting. My thoughts: I’ve been a daily reader for about two years. I’ve only recently started commenting articles, and I always try to keep it positive. I think from all the people posting “long time reader, first time commenter” that the problem is this minority of HaD readers turns out to be the most vocal. Also to those of you who said “That’s been me at times in the past”; +1 for admitting it and working on it.
Grammar and spelling – I notice but never even care. Subject/verb agreement is something you guys could work on, but I might take advantage of your offer to e-mail corrections to you. I never thought it was acceptable to do so in public forum, so I just ignored it.
I’ve never even seen Jeri, I always just read the write-ups. Her SDR a couple weeks ago had my head spinning, but I learned a lot. Objectifying a person as smart as she is shameful to be sure, and I’m sad to call myself part of a community that has been (even partially) responsible for such. Perhaps this is the step in the right direction that was needed
I’ve noticed that a lot of posters seem to care WHO posts about a hack they did. Does it really make a difference of which gender they are ?
I have a feeling that these armchair quarterbacks would fold under the pressure of actually carrying on a non-sexist conversation with someone of the opposite sex.
Perhaps keep in mind that a lot of people will be reading what you post, don’t make yourself look like an idiot.
I know that comment trolls have kept me from posting here before now. Here hoping for a new start.
Moderators: The internet is a place for trolls. Why not just put a user moderation system in place and let the community decide what’s offensive and what’s not?
http://xkcd.com/810/
Mission F’n Accomplished
In fact I rather enjoy a long winded, insightful, thought provoking troll post.
Perhaps this policy will teach our trolls to perfect the art, rather than one-liner cheap shots and racial slurs.