No, it's not. Again: I've read Squashed for a long time. He goes back to the very beginning of Tumblr. Usually, he writes for himself and, perhaps, for a small core of readers who like his opinions. You need to understand that Tumblr's different from most blogging platforms in that it has a built-in community, so that the people who use it frequently feel a lot more freedom to express their opinions in a more personal way. Marco Arment, who's on Tumblr's staff, just wrote this week about how he never tries to write for news aggregators anymore.

So Squashed disagrees with the people who flamed out against him, and I'm certain he believes what he's writing, but don't see it as him trolling. Rather, it's him writing how he feels without thinking about who's going to read it. I'm certain he didn't expect Hacker News picking on him, and so didn't make an attempt to round out his writing and make his ideas balanced.

He has that right. Since when do bloggers have to write for any audience other than themselves?

since the 'net made the world small enough that you have to deal with the opinions of those you've offended

He doesn't, really. If things got bad enough, he could disable comments and ignore us all.

I think we're a mature enough community, however, to learn not to get ourselves enraged over one man's personal blog, and to let him keep to his own circle. We can just not upvote the things he writes that we decide offend us.

It would be a shame if the shrinking world led to alienation and hatred rather than to communities selective enough not to start flamewars with all the other ones.

I think grandalf is right on this one. That last article was pretty dickish.

I hadn't actually expected a whole lot of people to read it. (No, I'm not doing anything to promote the site. Some of the ... less gracious than usual comments tipped me off that something was up, and Google Analytics suggested I look at ycombinator to figure out why the heck it had increased my monthly traffic by 900%.)

The big regret? I was reworking the layout. Because I suck at CSS, this takes a few days. Normally it's not a big deal. There may be forty or fifty non-Dashboard visitors. When traffic spikes at the same time as the layout is unprecedentedly ugly, that's something to be ashamed of. I'm surprised anybody even read the article. I would have been tempted to comment, "D00d, ur site is uglier than ur m0m. tl/dr."

There are other ways to express one's opinion besides a comment section on the blog post itself. Granted, he can choose to ignore those too, but it's harder. HN and e-mail are two examples of places feedback can go.