Fitting that relentless productivity blog Lifehacker, which I frequently participate at, has announced their new commenting policy. Some of these are omni (everyone hates spam), others involve useless redundancy which lots of people silently grit their teeth over. No longer.
Glad Adam @ LH has called out the waste that is "First!", which, as they say, adds nothing to a conversation. Other unwanted "I'm so sick of seeing that" lines are there, and in particular, "Commenting Without Reading the Post" is close to my heart:
If said commenter had read the post, he/she would have seen that not only did we acknowledge the issue in question, we explained in detail why that doesn't matter, how to make it work, or what can do Y.
Damn straight, I've been through that many times. "Yapping without learning" is one of the dumbest things: I've seen a lot of people get enraged at the tail of a discussion, in large part because of (1) aptitude-crippling prejudice and (2) they didn't read everyone's comment before them. If you didn't, how can you fully understand? You can't. You're missing context and this leads to incivility.
Oh, and grammar Nazis are also called out.
More blogs should be upfront like Lifehacker — it's true it's often best to minimize involvement with trolls and jerks, but it's even more true it's important to state what's expected, so quality commenters don't feel intimidated and can focus on The Good Stuff™.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh man! The people who go "first!" "second!" "third!" then go along and say "Oh man, I wasn't first!? second then!" then again reply with "What!? I guess 5th." Useless. Someone will post a game up on Kongregate and before it's even loaded there's about three pages of "first!!!!" It makes my day to flag their comments over there while the game sets up.
Then there's the tools who come along into a thread that had it's arguments and has now moved on to the agree to disagree phase, and start it all up again with their idiotic comments. The least they could do is formulate some sort of educated response rather than a "u r al st00pid" type response.
I mute a lot of people on forums. Keeps me from wigging out and being all unladylike
second!
@Lorimae It's funny how I've never seen a "last", not counting moderators who can LOCK the comment threads. It's just bloated slop, and not even funny at… "First!"
Liberal use of the mute button IS far better than getting into protracted arguments which eat away your life. The vast majority of forum and extended discussions, I'm convinced, don't lead to substantially actionable outcome. Therefore, useless.
@jenny Don't tempt me now!