[Editor’s Note: After we posted this, we got hit by a comment-report attack, and about 1,000 (!) comments across the whole site got sent back into the moderation queue on Saturday. We’ve since re-instated them all, but that took a lot of work.
About halfway down the comments in this article, the majority of comments are “hey, why did you delete this?” We didn’t, and they should be all good now. We debated removing the “try deleting this!” comments, but since we didn’t delete them in the first place, we thought we should just leave them. It makes a royal mess of any discussion, and created a lot more heat than light, which is unfortunate.]
You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)
What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.
And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.
It was to the point that we were discussing just shutting down the comments entirely. But then we got gems! [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all, but also because it shows who is reading Hackaday!
Or take [Al Williams]’s article on mold-making a cement “paper” airplane. It was a cool technique, but the commenters latched onto his assertion that you couldn’t fly a cement plane, and the discussions that ensued are awesome. Part of me wanted to remind folks about the nice mold-making technique on display, but it was such a joy to go down that odd rabbit hole, I forgive you all!
We have an official “be nice” policy about the comments, and that extends fairly broadly. We really don’t want to hear what you don’t like about someone’s project or the way they presented it, because it brings down the people out there who are doing the hard work of posting their hacks. And hackers have the highest priority on Hackaday.
There are better ways of dealing with negative feedback than complaining and lambasting your readers. I’ve been posting rather decent comments and jokes here for a while and reading hackaday for years, and this felt like a personal affront and a flag of what is to come.
I think I’m done here now. So long and thanks for all the fish.
I really feel this article could have been better if it were a 30 min youtube video, the written word is so last century ;-D
Yeah, that’s what passes for a HaD “article” these days … two paragraphs introducing a YouTube video.
As a recovering NextDoor moderator I can assure you that HaD comment quality and moderation are miles ahead of the mindless vitriol of the former mentioned site.
Things I enjoy about HaD comments: witty obviously fake names; clever insights by skilled, educated folks who choose to share their expertise and experience; on-point one liners with just enough snark to be funny without being mean.
IMO HaD comments are required reading as they provide context and a reality check for those of us why may not have sufficient expertise to read the content critically. It’s a learning experience!
As for publishing on a three hour schedule, I appreciate the variety of HaD articles including those that are simple or commercial knowing that I can always scroll post those and discover truly amazing contributions.
I too would like to see a follow-up article by the author responding to the critique and suggestions offered in the hundreds of comments so far.
There’s something else that I was told by “mommy” when I was little, by the way.
A person’s character can be measured by how he/she handles criticism.
Being able to cope with criticism is a sign of maturity, thus.
By countering with humor and self-irony, for example.
Or by accepting the criticism received and then asking the critic how to make it better.
Last but not least, the world isn’t always fair, also.
There are situations in which individuals face strokes of fate.
Those who’ve never learnt to fail won’t be able to become good loosers, either.
And that’s maybe more important than being a “winner” all the time or always being told so, at least.
Falling and then being able to stand up again is more of a lesson in life than to avoid falling altogether.
That’s why “mommy” didn’t always help us to get on our feet again ASAP.
Learning to cope through failure seems like a pain, but it’s rewarding in later life.
Those who always had been protected from small disappointments may be crushed by unpleasent events in later life even moreso.
These are things to consider, maybe.
What would Elon say?
If moderators are not behaving Elon will buy up the entire HAD for pocket money.
HAD is about hacks, but the person who does it is more like a maker not a hacker,
“hackers” have negative connotation and it’s not p.c. anymore.
Pretty much everyone who used the internet before the censorship took hold agrees it was better then. Before this, not one single American would have demanded that you respect some corporate right to censor you. Before 2010 nobody smugly backed ‘the rules’ when they removed rights. We all knew better.
If I have ever left a negative or hurtful comment, please let me know in an e-mail. I am sorry if I did, but glad I don’t. Thank you for the insights on the articles and making the first website that comes up be Hackaday.com. 73’s
It’s telling how many comments here are acting like “don’t be a jack ass” from the article is the same as “Never disagree with or criticize anything!” despite the article literally saying they encourage criticism as long as it’s constructive.
Just don’t behave like someone that would have been kicked out of the cave back in our hunter gather stages people.
This site was awesome in 2006. I learned stuff from your articles.
As the articles have become …less full bodied.., the comments have become relatively more important.
Many times the articles don’t contain the context to understand the genre in which the hack (or product) lives and competes (for time or sales).
It’s funny seeing the editor post a few times “we don’t get paid for engagement”. It’s hard to believe when that’s how every site gets paid (unless they have paywalls/subscriptions or they exist via some corporate benefactor that they consistently push).
Maybe you can have direct.hackaday.com where all comments are allowed and happy.hackaday.com where every comment is transmuted to “OMG SO COOL” if it gets >=0 reports.
i just wanted to say i appreciated the update with the description of why all the comments went missing. thanks!
“Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like.”
Here’s one: ‘Why? If you don’t like a comment move on quietly.’
I’ve seen many a site that had management that went a bit too far in their dream of total control and cleaned the comments like crazy or removed the comment section, and all of them end up dying and being gone in a relatively short time.
But hey, what is more censored and free of ‘negativity’ than having no site at all eh?
But the proof is in the pudding and I think I see HaD going that route, and the management won’t admit what happened of course, but some of the commenters will know.
It’s also funny that HaD does on a regular basis put up articles to troll people into commenting because they know it creates ‘user engagement’ and increases traffic
Perhaps this article is part of that, but at the same time we know they do like to censor a bit too much, so they are walking into their own trap as it were.
There’s kinds of comment that any platform must find a way to stamp out before they take over and drive off the sort of people who have more valuable or insightful things to say. So if you don’t restrict speech at all at the platform level, then it’s done for you in a worse way at the individual level. We can’t seem to have an article mention green energy without a few people ignoring the entire article to spew the same discredited lines about how all electric vehicles are ten thousand times worse for the environment than all gas vehicles, and that they will never get any better. If you allow that sort of commenter to proceed further than they generally do on this platform, eventually you may get them to say things like “climate change is acutally a myth created by the lizard people overlords”. Only sometimes you get antisemites, and with those people instead of lizard people it’s jews. Luckily, commenters here don’t visibly go that far, but it’s a valid concern for platforms in general. There has to be a line you draw where someone who crosses it is not trying to operate within the social contract and does not deserve its protection.
Something that does happen here is that it’s not just the assertion itself, it’s the way it’s argued. There’s something called gish gallop, which is an example of the principle that someone who’s wrong can still make it so that in order to convincingly argue against them, you need to spend much more time and effort than they did. E.G. it takes less effort to say “hope you like having kids strip mining a ton of lithium for your electric hummer” than to prove that a) the hummer uses a bigger battery than a regular ev b) that kids didn’t mine the lithium from some particular source or from various representative sources c) that perhaps the lithium wasn’t strip mined because it came from surface salt flats or whatever d) that a more typical EV had say 12kg of lithium in it rather than a ton because almost all the mass is in other elements like the casings and cooling. This is a situation where because they were unreasonable enough not to consider or address weaknesses in their view, and they aren’t convinced by the consensus of experts, it takes an almost bulletproof and exhaustive argument just to counter a single sound bite they got somewhere. And it’s not even because you want to convince them, but because it drags down the quality and usefulness of the comment section if some of what’s in it is nonsense that is given equal weight to the good stuff. If people could mark comments like these without getting them actually removed or hidden, then it would help to make clear when people think a comment is low-value without actually censoring anyone unnecessarily.
Another thing that happens here is that someone writes an unreasonable or even rude/combative comment and thinks anyone who disagrees too strongly is a snowflake trying to victimize them for ‘innocent criticism’. Apparently the freedom of speech that allows them to spew their nonsense doesn’t allow anyone to use their own free speech to call them out for it. (Perhaps this is too harsh, but nevertheless.) Or perhaps it’s ‘toxic positivity’ to ask people to not insult each other’s parentage, but I don’t think that’s valid. In these cases, too, it’s not that the thread should be nuked, but it’s still not a positive contribution. In some cases, which depend on the mechanics of the particular platform, it helps to have a representative of the platform able to step in and attach to the item in question the note that while the offending item won’t be removed, the platform or moderator’s opinion on the matter is that it’s wrong and that the truth is XYZ, or that such-and-such is not desirable content and can people try to do better. (Sort of like this article, but more targeted.)
Voting systems can work, although you’ve got to make it so that only logged-in individuals vote and anonymous comments are more likely to hit the moderation queue briefly if they go negative in votes. It helps if you’re very efficient at going through that queue and have someone paid to sit there doing so, which isn’t really always going to be true. They can also not work very well, but often the times they don’t are when there’s an exploit or when voter participation is low enough that the disingenuous voters can dominate the vote to promote their own narrative.
Yeah, like the wall of text you just posted lmao
If you can’t understand it because it’s too long, that reflects worse on you than on me. :)
Does anyone remember that infamous day many years ago when Gizmodo posted an item on a similar theme to this one (but somewhat more inflamatory), and then gleefully banned all of the hundreds of commenters who made negative comments about it? I applaud HaD for not taking that sort of tack, but nevertheless how can anyone not realize that a post like this one will inevitably generate more heat than light? Perhaps it would be a little more effective to include a “Please be nice and make this a happy place for everyone” heading for each and every article, to serve as a nonconfrontational reminder.
Comments may become more civil IF we had the ability to edit them. It’s crazy, to me, how we still can’t do that, let alone delete them if we wish.
The “be nice” policies is what got us to the current mess. Nobody should ever be nice to flat earthers, antivaxxers, chemtrail believers and all other kinds of tinfoil hat trash. And yes, some of them did show up even here. Being nice to them is giving them a platform. They must feel hated, ostracised, yet such policies give them a warm welcome instead. Unacceptable.