Why would someone do that?

Because search engines love text. What the comments above have done is create a lot of text that the SEs can index, perhaps leading to more people coming to this page.

OTOH, this site, like many others, uses the nofollow tag, meaning that SEs are oblivious to all those links left above.

So, if this were a commercial website, what’s happened is you’ve had a bunch of people create valuable content and, unless a human clicks their link, they’ve gotten absolutely nothing out of it.

(I welcome comments, but I’ve disabled the nofollow “feature” on all my sites for reasons including those above.)

I normally don’t read many blogs that don’t enable comments. I used to get a magazine in the mail almost every day- now I get none. Times change.

If everyone had a blog, the net would be miles wide and fractions of an inch deep. A blog with comments is a visible island. Of course we come back to read more comments- that’s how conversation is supposed to work.

Considering that this is all an evolution, most of it less than five years old, it seems not unreasonable to anticipate further changes….

You repeat your error here. Spelling correctly is not an error of the kind or of the importance of saying that 2 + 2 = 5. It’s more like using the salad fork for the main course. (Or, to put it differently, no matter what the pomos say, spelling is conventional, and arithmetic is not conventional).

Yglesias apparently doesn’t have an editor, and his self-editing is a little erratic. Who cares? Ogged was joking when he made his original post.

1. I have mixed feeling about disemvowellment. The residue is so entertaining that I’m compelled to attempt to reconstruct comments which I already know are useless and offensive, which probably wastes more time than reading the uncompressed crap.

One such I encountered in the Nielsen-Hayden domain was so monosyllabic and childish that I could make no sense of it, which might have been a blessing had not the next twenty commenters quoted most of it.

2. Never delete a comment without notice. Remove or replace the text but leave at least the name, so subsequent replies make sense. Please. I’ve wasted too much time searching in vain for missing antecedent comments. It’s your place, do as you will, but please maintain the thread.

3. Your comment preview feature is one of the coolest things I’ve encountered in the blogosphere. Why doesn’t everyone do this?

Blogs and commentaries are quickie things, often written after a few beers, so they’re particularly susceptible to writing errors.

But, if you want to be considered sane or even simply healthy, you don’t go running head first into brick walls.

If you want to be a good musician, you don’t play a G-chord on the wrong frets, as George W did in that famous photo of him with a guitar while Katrina was drowning New Orleans.

If you want to be considered a good modern scientist, you don’t go around repeating a medieval argument for a “watchmaker” or intelligent designer, an argument easily debunked in the 17th and 18th centuries as creating an infinite regress in which God ends up an un-Godlike arbitrary stopping point to the regress.

If you wanted to be considered an expert or even just good elementary school student in the basics of arithmetic, you don’t write 2+2=3, then say, close enough.

If you’re a logician seeking a valid argument, you don’t insist on the validity of arguments where all the premises are true but the conclusion false.

If you want to be considered a good ethical deliberator, you don’t make comparisons between bad spelling and genocide.

If you want to be considered a respectable writer, you try to spell words correctly and use proper grammar unless the substantive goal is to challenge the conventions of spelling and grammar or perhaps to portray phonetically a particular dialectic, as in Faulkner and many others. These are just basic tools of writing, like the rules of arithmetic, logic, and good sense. They cna be cretaively broken, but it’s the rare thinker who’s capable of that in a way that challenges our sense of propriety. Most of us just break them because we’re lazy or don’t them.

In the Yglesias case or whoever (MY is a placemarker here, a variable), he’s writing for ostensively respectable sites, which are not trying to challenge paradigms of grammar and spelling and not trying to do paradigm-challenging poetry. But if you can’t do that, you get a good editor who can.

That’s all that’s about. It’s not a “cause.” You can spell poorly all you want. If you do it in the present context of a string of comments, it’s easy to overlook. If you do it consistently ina broader public forum, you’re not doing your job very well or you have really poor editors. But you still ought to be able to do the job well in the first place.

And like Yglesias himself said, poor spelling doesn’t make one a bad person.

I don’t give a damn if Unfogged thinks Hilde is a tool.

The more you write that, the more you convince everyone.

I spell well and find it mildly annoying when others don’t, but Hilde seems to have raised to to the level of a cause, which I think is ridiculous. There are lots of very sharp people who spell badly—I’m not even talking about The Underclass or The Wotking Class, but a lot of engineers and the like.

That’s history. I don’t give a damn if Unfogged thinks Hilde is a tool.

The point is not in following a comment string (though it’s clear that can get you into trouble), but whether or not blogs are open to non- club members. I discovered I wasn’t part of that particular club. Fine. But then it’s also difficult to see commentary as dialogue that builds on an idea or set of comments or even run with a joke. I’m sure this doesn’t apply to all blogs. But I can also see that it applies to a lot of blogs, especially ones with wide readership. So… maybe there’s a theory to be had there—a “universalization,” as it was originally put. But I don’t know what that would be.

There’s a clubiness about comment strings. Some say that’s one of the best things about blogs. But there’s a quality issue there too. That’s the originalquestion of the particular line and it’s a difficult one. My answer was to stay small. But many blogs have larger ambitions. So theory-wise, who knows? It’s a bit like industrial farming versus small, family-owned farms. Flame me on that with for a good reason and I might change my mind on the analogy….

Bob, lurking is probably a good idea. And if one wants to say “asshole”—as someone just did in comments at T-Bogg regarding a link to my site (on an absurdist post between me and T-Bogg)—why don’t we just stick to Bush, Cheney, and Rove, who are the Platonic forms of asshole?

One last thing—to John Emerson #35… I think good spelling is something we ought to keep trying to do in general. Disagree with that if you like, but I can’t see a good reason for doing so. But the comparison to forced cliterectomy and genocide is a really really bad one you that ought to reconsider, perhaps especially if you think it has humor value.

It is a good idea to read a few posts, follow some comment threads before you enter the conversation at a blog. Sometimes extensively, if you think it worth the time. You can get a sense of the community, it’s standards, tone, & purpose.
You no more jump in blindly than you crash a party.

A cursory reading of that particular thread should have made it obvious that your tone would be unwelcome. You were a troll.

I am very cautious in commenting at Unfogged, preparing my vulgar intellectual contextual snark…Rabelais?…far in advance so as not to inject soap or seriousness into their recreational mudpuddle.

Mostly, as I do at 90% of blogs, I lurk.

I have absolutely nothing against Yglesias. I don’t know him, have only come across his essays a few times, and they never did much for me. I asked some of the unfogged people to send me a link to some of the posts they were calling “brilliant” (their terms. I didn’ receive any. So I wrote something on my own blog on one recent post I found by Yglesias. I found that the Yglesias piece didn’t have anything to say to me. It’s not just MY. Thomas Friedman bugs the hell out of me. I love Krugman at time and at others think he wrote his editorial before waqking up in the morning. But not liking a post, and thinking there is a correllation between reading well and spelling—thnough not an absolute one—doesn’t mean I am dogshit (Ogged preferred to call me “asshole”). For those which it does, there’s a whole lot of history or stories there that I don’t know about in the first place, and really don’t care to follow out.

So, whatever, on that one. Ogged in #44 also could have linked to my other comments in that Unfogged comment string, such as one one where I said I was too cavalier with the “sometimes an idiot” comment (which, if you read it again, is not directed at Yglesias anyway) but didn’t. He could have also linked to his own. Ogged accused me of equating some other poster’s father’s spelling with both dyslexia and being an unerudite auto mechanic. The only thing I had said about dyslexia was that I have a mild case of it, which was also twisted into me being a “tool”, “asshole”, etc. by Ogged.

But, good on you, if you’re still all chatting at Unfogged about how Tom Hilde is a tool or whatever.

So, again, another lesson in the randomness of comment strings. I made the mistake in the one I recounted of entering in the middle of a string, then being called a troll. Ogged, here is trying to get the thing going again.

That’s where it becomes pointless to me. Thus, possibly, making my case in #25. Possibly not. But now that we’re at this point, I’m not sticking around here anymore. Because that’s precisely what’s pointless about comments.

And #30, right on. Thanks for the useful remarks.

And,John Emerson, thanks for being more reasonable. I don’t mean that patronizingly. I don’t care for Yglesias’ stuff. But I also don’t like the cartoon Family Circus, and I’ve got serious issues with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. None of that means calling the stuff I don’t like idiotic.

I’m really not even sure what being called a troll means anymore. Didn’t it used to mean someone from a different political persuasion trying to get a rise out of others just for kicks? Or calling them “tools” or whatever? Now it seems “troll” means anyone who doesn’t agree with you, however slight the disagreement. That’s a bad sign for blog commentary being a dialogue.

I invite anyone who might be interested (I promise only amusement, not edification), to read the comment for which Mr. Hilde was abused. You might also want to read the original post, which, oddly enough, was making fun of Matt Yglesias.