Commentary
February 4, 2012 at 11:13 PM by Dr. Drang
Well, it’s been about a month since the last argument about the value of blog comments among the sites I read. I said my piece in favor of comments (for me—I don’t care what other people do) in a comment (’cause I’m so clever and meta) at Macdrifter. I haven’t changed my mind, and I don’t intend to make any new arguments, but I felt I had to bring the topic up again because of two comments that appeared here on ANIAT today.
The first was from Nathan Grigg, who runs a smart blog on computer/Mac/technical topics that people who visit here would probably enjoy. Nathan’s comment is an example of why I have comments here. He provided an improvement to an AppleScript of mine, and in the process taught me a method for extracting substrings I’d never seen before. Because most of the people who come here are like Nathan, I tend to get good comments that improve the site.
The counterexample was this comment from someone who’s apparently never run across anyone referring to a country as “she” or “her.” Rather than spending a minute or so to look for examples (see Berlin, Irving by way of Smith, Kate), he decided to spend that minute writing a comment he thought was devastatingly clever, but which only displayed his ignorance to rest of the internet.
These two comments are perfect examples for each side of the argument. One is like a thoughtful hostess gift brought to a party; the other is like a turd dropped in the middle of the living room.
