Even when it's critical though, I still see that as highly useful if it is not done from a merely dogmatic viewpoint. Picking apart an idea or argument is very useful in understanding it. This should be done especially if a person disagrees with it because absent dissection it is virtually impossible to pinpoint not just why and what you disagree with, but also whether or not that flaw can be rectified.
I've come into conversations at times where I disagreed (or agreed) with something only to see a key component elaborated or additional evidence provided, changing my mind.
So, I see a community in HN that ruthlessly dissects ideas. Most things aren't perfect so there will always be some degree of "that's wrong". I don't think that makes HN inherently negative. Though yes, I do occasionally see comments that seem to go out of their way to find flaws peripheral to the topic at hand and inflate them, derailing more productive conversation.
That’s why I keep coming back to HN. But even I have to admit that those valuable posts are in the minority of comments these days.
You’re right that the HN community tries to dissect everything, but a staggering number of those dissection attempts are coming from people who don’t know what they’re talking about or who didn’t bother reading the article. I’ve seen countless comment sections where the majority of comments are from angry people who clearly didn’t read the article but want to complain about what they assumed the article said.
Worse, the bad comments are often extremely confident despite being wrong. This effect is most obvious when you click on a comment section for something you know very deeply, only to see highly upvoted comments saying things that can often be disproved with 2 minutes of Googling.
The good comments can still be found, but it takes work to find them.
I think Dan Luu said it best:
> HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously mean.
His full blog post: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
When a user submits a comment, echochamber.js will save the comment to the user's LocalStorage, so when they return to the page, they can be confident that their voice is being heard, and feel engaged with your very engaging content. It does not make any HTTP requests. Since LocalStorage is only local, you and your database need not be burdened with other people's opinions.
The strange thing was that you could post to the site, and it would be persisted there, but it wouldn’t get forwarded to 4chan. So you could post effectively, and see continuous conversation, but no one would ever respond. An odd form of self-inflicted hellbanning.
I removed the comments because I realized that they weren't worth the extra JS on the page and hassle of moderation.
Maybe the trick is to not get to real success numbers, but I could think of dozens of blogs I read with 0-10 comments per post and no discernible amount of trolling, spamming (well, automated tools help ofc) and so on.
There's the occasional lucid, intelligent comment that truly elevates a post or inspires someone, but they are by far the rarity.
On the other hand, I'm speaking of comments on larger sites, not small blogs.
I have no interest in allowing comments on my personal blog. If people want to engage me, they will do so directly.
Well no offense but what are you doing here if you think that the comments are so bad? I quite disagree, hn comment threads are generally quite good quality and civil, and you will find knowledgeable people chiming in.
>almost every discussion revolves around people trying to find things to complain about
Quite meta x))
Also: here is a blog which definitely wouldn't be the same without comments https://terrytao.wordpress.com/
I actually wonder this a lot, strange behavior isn't it? lol
Counterpoint: I've created a blog with highly technical content a couple of years ago and put there a simple home-grown commenting system with manual moderation. I expected a lot of low quality content but actually your 99% were rather a 9% and some people spent serious time writing excellent in depth comments, pointing out the limitations of the subject or extending it it one way or another.
I guess the quality of the comments on receives is directly proportional to the time taken by the content creator to deliver good quality articles and the site UX in general. Of course there's always some noise and spam but small sites are not Reddit or HN and the comment sections don't necessarily need to reflect what you see here or on other big social sites.
I think slowing down the speed at which a person can respond will greatly decrease low value content. And probably be better for everyone involved.
An example, my local paper is trash. Yet, to comment online I have to register and subscribe and .... it's hard, so I just don't. I don't comment, or read that paper anymore.
Which is a somewhat bad example, because I'm not consuming the content. However if something is low quality or I disagree with it, or agree even, I need to pair action with my reaction. I'm pretty busy these days. So to complain or compliment It needs to be good.
Back when I blogged and people read blogs and commented on them.
I have developed something I call an "Iceberg Article"[1] which is "... a single page of writing which links to a larger collection of supporting documents, resources and services."
One of those supporting resources could be a discussion thread - or even a forum.
I don't think every "Iceberg Article" needs to have a discussion - and none of mine do, as of yet. I think it can have its place, however.
My blog isn't getting much traffic or many comments though. I would imagine that as something gets more popular it attracts more negative attention. That being said, the more popular niche photography blogs ( mainly about film photography ) have largely positive comments as well.
Promoting just an email will yield a much lower communication rate. Which might be OK in some cases but it's also nice to receive comments. As long as they are not terrible...
The comment field medium isn't particularly conducive to meaningful and interesting conversations, which is ultimately what I want to promote if I put something on the Internet. At best you get posturing.
Emails (or blog posts) require more thought to be put into what's written, and they also even the playing field. It feels a lot more like a conversation compared to the blogger-commenter relation.
If they can't be bothered (or don't blog) then fine, but there's a more limited upside to that comment and we can probably do without it. Especially since the SNR is often so low with spam, referrals, mutually beneficial (supposedly) SEO requests, etc.
I instead share a contact e-mail. This works as a good deterrent to filter the pointless complainers, while still allowing those who truly need to contact me to have a way to do so.
EDIT: Just might need to clarify that I don't mean that HN is overwhelmingly negative, just that the comments usually revolve about nitpicking terms and concepts which would fall into the concept of something "negative".