No comments

I’ve gone back and forth on comments since I started blogging in February 2002. When I remember I disable them but rarely get any comments on posts where I forget. We don’t get a lot of visitors here but that’s always been fine by me. One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Winer, has what I consider the best approach to comments.

Start a blog, I advise, and say what you have to say and link to my post. Of course what they really wanted was to use my flow to (very often) zing me personally in some way. I consider that spam. Or hijacking. It gets so insidious so quickly that I haven’t had comments here for any duration for many years. It starts off collegial, but quickly devolves into abuse as the trolls take over.

I’ve attempted to disable all comments from previous posts but haven’t checked to see if that worked.

“School is largely a service for the parents.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that kids do well without school. School is largely a service for the parents. I remember as a kid being really pissed off that so much of my youth was wasted sitting in rooms with my hands folded, with my mind anywhere but in school, learning nothing and being bored out of my mind. I thought of school as very lazy, unimaginative, typical of adults. It wasn’t really until grad school that school started working for me, on the terms I wanted it to.”

— Dave Winer

Time to grow up

“We live infinitesmally short lifespans on an insignificant speck of dust in space, with delusions of grandeur, when the best we can achieve, which is pretty good, is friendship, love and to a small extent, self-awareness. We’re going to get smart now, and learn to be the humble mortals that we are. Or we’re going to cease to exist. In other words, it’s time for the human race to grow up.”

Dave Winer

Blogging coming back in style?

David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp) is leaving Medium for… a WordPress blog.

“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions.”

“Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.”

“With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”

I’ve been seeing articles (posts?) on Medium for six or seven years but never paid much attention. Here’s the Wikipedia page. Mr. Hansson’s post reads like Dave Winer from the early days of blogging.

Why Dave Winer won’t point to Facebook posts

He has two other reasons with which I agree, but this is my favorite:

“It’s supporting their downgrading and killing the web. Your post sucks because it doesn’t contain links, styling, and you can’t enclose a podcast if you want. The more people post there, the more the web dies. I’m sorry no matter how good your idea is, fuck you I won’t help you and Facebook kill the open web.”

I’ll have a blog till the day I die or I’m too far gone to maintain it. God willing, I’ll have an AI to take over at that point.

Dave Winer’s Comment Guidelines

I forgot how often Dave Winer says things I think but can’t find the words for. Below are a few excerpts from his comment guidelines on Scripting News.

They should always take into account what is said in the post. If you haven’t read the post in full, reasonably carefully, don’t comment. If it is obvious that you have not read the post, your comment will be deleted.

It’s not a free speech zone. It’s not a place for you to be heard.

It’s not a place for you to promote your products, services, blog, initiatives, political causes. Don’t post spam.

I’m not interested in debates here on my blog. If you want a debate, host it somewhere else, and if I’m interested in participating I will.

Absolutely no personal comments about me or anyone else.

“Google+ is a bank”

Dave Winer believes Google+ wants to “move money around the same way Amazon does. They need your real name because it’s a business.”

“Google-Plus is their integrated communication system. Over time, it’s going to be at the core of everything they do, from auctions, to paying for things with Android phones, to their groupon and yelp clones. They’re going everywhere, and this is the system that will tie it all together. So, at the outset, of course they need real identities. That Google-Plus account you’re playing with today is going to be your bank account next year.”