A vaguely passive-aggressive post on commenters

why i generally stick to lurking

This will end well.

Yawn

I am sorry you think so poorly of us.

I must be at 11, Spinal Tap style.

11. The commenter whose post is nothing more than a variation on “me too.”

12. The commenter who is actually interested in advertising his or her own book/blog/whatever. (This is a variation on #4. One of these people shows up in the comment threads at my local newspaper’s website; he makes a brief comment which invariably ends with the information that we can read his complete views on his blog.)

13. The commenter who may well be saying something interesting, but you’ll never know because his or her comment is unreadable due to a poor grasp of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, or sentence structure.

14. The commenter who tries to have a conversation and bring his or her own knowledge to the table but who just isn’t particularly interesting. I’m afraid I fall into this category more often than not.

If only Chris has read the second treatise of Heinrich von Pumpkin in the original German

It’s van Pumpkin, and it was in Flemish.

I have retired, andfuture CT comment threads should be, as this one is, on topic and extremely interesting.

doesn’t this go under the earlier discussion of “how to write a post to generate more than 100 comments”?

Chris could be a little more grateful – CT could have Matt Yglesias’ commenters!
It is an interesting question, little asked: who has the best comments threads? My vote would be for Mark Thoma’s blog. I love the commenters there.

“Mrs Tilton” is male?

God, ouch.

Alright, goodbye.

P O’Neil beat me to the joke I wanted to make. Probably better he did, as his version was funnier. More seriously, though, I’d be interested in hearing from Chris about whether he thinks there are non-specialist blogs w/o highly moderated comments that do much better than CT. I don’t know of any, if many. There are obviously some problems (and problem cases) here, but it seems much better than average. The comments are, to my mind, usually net positives while on most blogs the opposite is true. I do think that at least one important category was left out: Comments awaiting moderation for having mentioned soc1al1sm. Surely that’s as common as some of 1-10 above!

In the old days, the response to a post of this kind would be ‘welcome to USENET’.

…I’m sorry. It occurs to me that my expression of the hurt experienced upon reading this post actually qualifies under #2 above. It was not my intention to exacerbate or provoke.

It was my intention to say: “The CT comments community is one of many communities, online and offline, to which it has been a pleasure and privilege for me to belong. I second Chis Dornan’s comment to the effect that I am sorry to have perhaps contributed, I promise you inadvertently, to the nontrivial disappointments you have experienced as a CT author. It was my understanding that largely all of us, within reasonable constraints but including the pesky and irritable among us, were reasonably warmly welcomed and appreciated here, despite being occasionally irksome, and that in the main our collective presence was very much enjoyed by the CT authors, including you. I am deeply saddened to learn that there exists this strong a discrepancy between the sense of community I have felt during my time commenting here and the sense of community you have experienced as a CT author, and will be sure to be attentive to the expectations you’ve set forth should I contemplate commenting on your future posts.”

It was hard to say these things right the first time because it felt a bit numb and struck to read this post, exactly as I would if the host of a largely pleasant large community get-together I was attending suddenly stepped forth to announce that he was sick of so many of us behaving like wankers. Even those who are not in the host’s mind at the time of that comment are given pause: it is natural to wonder, “so… does this mean I should leave? To what extent have I been an irritant?”

Anyhow, I hope you don’t let frustrations stemming from CT ruin the rest of your week-end!

13- there’s no such thing as the “Flemish language”, we speak Dutch (albeit in generally more eloquent ways than the people that are actually from Holland).

Croak!

30- I was first on 11 and “Is a variety of a language a language.” And anyway, wikipedia galore, I’m Flemish but I speak Dutch. Or don’t Americans speak English?

I’ve always found the comments section here to be by far the best of any blog I read. Certainly CT would be far less interesting without it. What blog do you think does better? Making Light? Unfogged maybe?

On can’t help feeling that some of these problems are just the flip side of the fact that a blog like this involves successful academics talking as equals to people from very different backgrounds, with different priors.

If it’s any consolation, good patients are even rarer than one in ten. But, you know, if they all already understood that they need to take responsibility for their own treatment, then I could probably be replaced very efficiently by a search engine that asked the Cochrane Collaboration which pill to prescribe. It’s one of those Fable of the Bees things, in that individual failings are the basis of society.

What you don’t realize is that what you say is always so correct and complete that there is nothing to add, so of course we pontificate on topics of interest to us using your post as a springboard. You should try to make more mistakes and omissions.

I’m chuckling and laughing while reading these comments, but if you want my full opinion you need to visit my blog, which is not written in Flemish (or Dutch, either).

That said, does anybody know of a study of the impact of Dutch cuisine on literary theory? In Fle … (ducks) … Dutch if need be.

(Oh god, I’m in Unfogged mode today…)

@ Aulus Gellius –

That Crooked Timber, a supposedly “philosophical” “blog,” posits such drivel about post-communism (the most significant development in the history of the world) is frankly appalling. No expert in the field can find two things wrong with post-communism, much less the nine enumerated here.

Clearly, Mr. or Ms. Chris Bertram, who hides his or her gender behind a deliberately androgynous name, is a clueless fakir unfamiliar with seminal works in the field, like those of University of Lund Professor Fiona Björling, who, in “From Nostalgia to Subversion: Different Modes in the Visual Documentation of Post-communist Russia,” identifies the cultural lacunae that wrap their acephalous arms around the anecdata of reality.

And let us not even mention the hypocrisy of Bertram, who, back in 2004, excoriated me for defending the legalization of prostitution, then in 2005 jumped on the “Whores! Hooray!” bandwagon, and who then, in 2008, dipped the shrimp of pimpage in the batter of stupid, stir-fried it up in the oil of obliviousness, and denounced Belle du Jour for seeking to monetize her experiences by writing books, instead of sticking to blow jobs.

I leave you with this thought, so eloquently expressed by Laurence Tenney:

“It might intrigue you to learn [assuming, presumptuously I fear, that you don’t already know it] that the ancient Hebrew word generally translated by certain blue-nosed XIXth Century clerics as “temple prostitute” was “qadeshah,” plural “qadeshot.” The “q” stands for a throaty glottal-stop consonant not used in Standard English, similar to the sound New Englanders use in the middle of the word “bottle.”

But I digress. I find that I digress more the older I get. Why is it that the word “Alzheimer’s” leaps so trippingly to the tongue?

Anyhoo, “Qadeshah,” by derivation, should be more properly translated as “holy one.” “

Slightly off topic: get your performance-enhancing drug that starts with a “c”and ends with an “s” here!

41/43. Do the Danes speak Scandinavian? Do the Scots speak Scottish? Do Brusselians speak Belgian? People from Liège Walloon? Les gens de Lille Flamand?

Do the Scots speak Scottish?

Careful there, JoB. A lot of Scots are very sensitive about Scots (the system of oral and literary communication) being a language rather than a dialect, similar to but differing from English. In Northern Ireland, Ulster Scots is, I believe, an official language of sorts.

@49 – indeed it is, and very difficult for an Englishman to look at without laughing. The official magazine of its ‘Agency’ is called Oot an Aboot, but tragically appears to be written in standard English, rather defeating its own purpose:
http://www.ulsterscotsagency.com/ulster-scots-publications/oot-an-aboot/magazine/

The Ulster Scots Society, OTOH, does at least keep some of its webpages in the ‘leid’:
“Tha Societie’s ettlin at soartin tha stannin o tha leid eftèr monie a lang day o bak-gaein an ïll-wïll, an it’s aye threapin fur it tae hae fïttin kennin frae govermenn, baith in buik-lear an oweraa.”

@lemuel – aw shucks. Thanks.

@Doctor Slack – On CT, I end up reading at least some of the comments for most posts, so they do add to the site for me. On blogs where the comments do annoy me, (Marginal Revolution, I’m looking at you) I find it easy to just stop reading at the end of the post so the comments, now I know what to expect, don’t really detract. Similarly YouTube, of course. So I find the idea of comments actively detracting from the value of a site odd.

11. The commenter who goes unnoticed or ignored, and thus misses out on the chance to be formulated as one of the stereotypical breeds of commenters.

@tom: “I find the idea of comments actively detracting from the value of a site odd.”

I think the difference for me is that, if I’m watching a clip of, say, a hockey fight or a Hindi movie on Youtube, I’m there primarily for the content and could care less about the “discussion” or lack thereof. On a blog like CT, however, the posts are often explicitly framed and constructed as jumping-off points for discussion, so it’s more of a drawback.

I think the comments on CT are an absolute wasteland seven times out of ten.

So, what blogs do you think have better comments? And how do they manage it?

(Not rhetorical questions.)

Surely Chris wouldn’t be surprised if CT readers took this post as something of an insult, or at the very least rather insensitive?

As others have said, the comments here are a huge poitive for the site. By the low, low standards of the internet you are collectively very lucky. Perhaps JQ is right about the comment/commenter distinction and about some contributors being targeted for bad comments. But this could have been rather more adroitly done. Unless you actually wanted to insult your reader-commenters that is, which I’m guessing you didn’t.

Here.

Blogs whose posters participate in the comments invariably have better comment sections. I think Crooked Timber is well above average in its comments section, probably for this reason. I certainly don’t share the hostility that posters here have toward the commenters.

For example, were I the proprietor of a blog, I’d be extremely flattered by type 7, and the type 4’s here are often well worth reading.

Oh yes, there’s another category: the commenter who posts something completely irrelevant to the main topics of the thread.

And what about a category for commentors who just make smart-arsed self-referential comments like this one?

“So, what blogs do you think have better comments? And how do they manage it?”

Well… comparing blogs can be a bit apples and oranges. An audience with a strong common interest, a well-established blog style or “culture” (often the product of the blog’s having been founded by a strong personality), or active and consistent moderating, or all three will tend to have better comments sections (those are advantages common in one way or another to blogs I read more frequently — Making Light, BookNinja, whatever Ebert’s film blog is called, Kung Fu Monkey, Antagony & Ecstasy, Digby’s Hullabaloo… Unfogged is another example, I guess, although it’s more of a glorified collective LiveJournal these days so maybe not a relevant one). It could be CT suffers from the lack of these advantages.

Nabakov 11.23.09 at 1:22 am
And what about a category for commentors who just make smart-arsed self-referential comments like this one?

And how about their nitpickers?

Wow, that last comment of mine sort of looks insulting to multiple parties. To clarify, when I say “founded by a strong personality” I mean a single strong personality whose style dominates the blog; I’m not accusing the CT bloggers of having weak personalities, it’s just that it’s a collective enterprise combining many different styles and approaches. And the LiveJournal crack about Unfogged wasn’t meant maliciously, it can be fine to have more of a focus on the quotidian, as it were.

This post has actually spurred me to make my first comment. I check this blog almost everyday and have done so for years, and 90% of the reason why is because of the commentators here. If it wasn’t for them, I would not bother to read the blog. So let me take this opportunity to thank the community for providing me with so much entertainment t and thought provoking insight throughout the years.

You forgot the commenter who attacks other commenters.

This post is reassuring, actually. I am often confused by the comments here and–I guess this is a sign of humility or insecurity or something–I think I must not be getting the post because the comments say things that don’t make sense to me, given what the post said. (At Unfogged often only the first comment or two bears a relationship to the post. But that’s not the scene here.)

“On the other hand, Type 4 is almost certainly the modal comment, followed by 3 and 2. ”

John, no offense, but brief scanning of the last few threads by you and Chris suggests that is not in fact the case. Really — pick one at random and go look.

I would respectfully suggest that a minority of comments — the classic few bad apples, if you like — are disproportionately coloring your perception.

Doug M.

@83 Doug, you may be right. Certainly, I have nothing much to complain about in the last few (a bit of Type 3, but I guess I deserve that for opining on subjects on which I’m not an expert), but there are some mammoth threads that, at least in my memory, consist almost entirely of 2s, 3s and 4s.

Maybe memory is playing tricks on me. If so, please remember that blogging is a lot of work, and the emotional energy involved in dealing with nasty comments is substantial, certainly enough to produce a jaundiced view of the whole enterprise on bad days.

Hey, if we could screw ourselves, d’ya think we’d be wasting our time here?

51/52/53- getting back on topic. Sensitivities: yep – there are Flemish people proud to speak Flemish (they tend to be boring and they don’t understand me when I go full out in my Germanic sounding dialect or start to talk as my kids talk, they also tend to have beards with no moustaches, a substandard bodily hygiene and kids with fear installed in their eyes as a sort of permanent resident). The Belgian Navy is trilingual: French (& not Walloon, even if they’re allowed to say ‘nonante’ and ‘septante’), German – usually used only for the beginning and ending of speeches and much amusing to the children – and, yes, Dutch (‘Ge zijt zot zekers as ge dacht da wijlie hier koeterwaals spraakten.’ &, yes, I apologize to the scottish and will refrain from misspelling Brown as McBrown.

And if I would inadvertantly say McBrown I would apologize for it after being aware of it.

And I would do thusly as well:

I’msorry to have said McBrown where I should have said Brown. I’m really sorry – consider me humbled

I’ve always thought that “bloggers pontificate and commenters(*) sub-pontificate”

* – the correct “commentators” seems outdated.

A friend (American, and Marxist) once said to me, about Thought for the Day, that about 1 in 3 seemed to be genuinely thoughtful, and that 1 in 3 was, by any standards, and astoundingly good hit rate. I’m inclined to agree with John Q’s diagnosis of this.

Salient, if you stop commenting here, I’ll stop posting.

OK, with some greater attentiveness to 10-ing, back to my usual innocent inadvertent peskiness. Blame JoB for dropping something irresistible to respond to:

Or don’t Americans speak English?

Nah. Not according to Don DeLillo, at least. For those who don’t feel like clicking through, here’s the opening line of Underworld:

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”

The ambiguity (as to whether American refers to the “voice” or to the reader and as to whether “American” is meant to reinforce and explicitly clarify the reader’s implicit assumption that their is identified as American, or instead suggests an inflection or deviation from that voice) is never exactly resolved, but if pressed I’d say Underworld is about exploring what a uniquely American “voice” would be and sensitively exploring how this is entwined with what and how we (we Americans) speak, our language: in the scene following we have an American crowd pestering an American entertainer to repeat popular lines from his show, as a kind of background hum behind the action that takes place.

#30 sums it up pretty well. But what makes the post really hilarious is the fact that quite a few CT authors comment all the time (much more so than in other blogs I know) and therefore have to count as commenters, in which case they fully qualify for CBs classification system and unless CB seriously wanted to claim that all their comments are of type 10, which would be rather hard to maintain in the face of empirical evidence, his post actually should be taken as proof of his ability for self-criticism.

…and we’ve reached comment # 100 , as i predicted we would, back at #17.

mission accomplished!

I have trouble believing that of the ten types, only one possesses the qualities one desires in a blog commenter. No wonder this is hard.

15. Commenters whose main interests are broken links, the appearance of the website in the beta of version of the Opera browser, etc.
16. Commenters who confine their comments to chastising others for violations of online etiquette.
17. Commenters who begin their comments with the phrase ‘late to the party’…
18. Commenters who, for reasons I shall never be able to fathom, refuse to use capital letters.
19. Commenters who want to use random anonymous strangers as a proxy to continue the emotional confrontation they have been having for the last fifteen years with hippies, Communists, authority figures, their father, grandmother, etc and this time WIN.
20. Commenters who want everyone to be nice to each other and by so doing reach a reasonable consensus.

I think (and I don’t think that it is that far off the mark, after six or more years of this), of CT’s comments sections as having bec0me like an extended family reunion. With all the bad stuff that goes along with that – oh gawd; Uncle Montgomery is telling his pet anecdote about the pilchards _again_ – but with a fair amount of the good stuff too. I’ve learned quite a bit from CT commenters over the years. That said, I do think, like TNH, that it is a good thing to ban genuine trolls summarily, and to engage in some very limited weeding of comments that drag down debate. But that’s a topic for another thread.

Then let the owner of the blog wipe out all comments except type 10. That should improve things a lot.

Commenters who, for reasons I shall never be able to fathom, refuse to use capital letters.

I used to think all lowercase was easier and faster to read, for folks generally, and therefore used capitals sparingly — but apparently the usual capitalization scheme really is better for readability (the paper most frequently cited in what I’ve read is “The legibility and readability of a visual display unit at threshold,” Paul Kember & David Varley in the 80s, but I haven’t read the article itself; my interest in such things was strictly best-practices-oriented as it stemmed from working in website design and at the time I didn’t care to read the underlying theory).

There’s probably plenty of updated research that accommodates folks who read twitters and text-messages and finds the readability of all lowercase has moved in an amenable direction, but it’s been years since I’ve looked into it (there has to be a type of commenter who insists on trying to be helpful despite the minimal familiarity at their disposal.)

I am however skeptical of your commitment to readability, because your numbered points are not aligned properly and are unreadable in Chrome, which is clearly a violation of online etiquette, which in turn conclusively proves you are a Communist, and therefore a fellow comrade, Q.E.D.

the paper most frequently cited in what I’ve read is “The legibility and readability of a visual display unit at threshold,” Paul Kember & David Varley in the 80s

evidently “salient” is unaware of von humperdinck’s devastating rejoinder in the proceedings of the slovenian philological society…

I only had time to read 4/10ths of this post, but to say that all the commenters here are bad is unfair and disgusting. Read your Rawls much?

Thanks Henry, I will now stand down & cease annoying everybody.

engels @104–

“18. Commenters who, for reasons I shall never be able to fathom, refuse to use capital letters.”

yeah, what the hell is with that?
some of them won’t even capitalize their own proper names.

A couple of data points regarding Scandinavian languages which I have always found interesting:

(1) In one of the Sjöwall and Wahlöö detective novels there is an anecdote about a Swedish policeman and a Danish colleague who had operated for years on the theory that the two languages were mutually intelligible. Finally they gave up and started talking English. They discovered that, whereas each had regarded the other as a good friend, once they began to understand each other friendship was replaced by mutual dislike.

(2) One of A.J. Liebling’s war pieces for the New Yorker was about crossing the Atlantic in a Norwegian tanker. Every night after dinner, all the officers who were off duty gathered in the wardroom, tuned in a Swedish radio station, and enjoyed half an hour of hearty laughter — the mere sound of spoken Swedish being regarded as hilarious.

The thing about capital letters is, as Salient says, they make comprehension easier for the reader. So the decision not to use them is a decision to make people do extra work to read your comments, which seems hard to justify. (Not capitalizing your name is, of course, fine.)

Not nearly as bad as the people who refuse to put spaces between their paragraphs, tho — that’s practically a self-disemvowelling.

ah yes–i seem to recall some brit saying “the name is fleming; ian fleming”.

Just noting that a near-quorum of active from my own blog has commented on this thread.

Salient said: I can’t speak for others but wouldn’t say I felt offended, not in the least. Stunned and shaken, yes,

Speaking of I am not so much shaken as stirred by this post.

yeah, what the hell is with that?

simple: they’re former RAF members (no, not the air force).

Because if they were pilots, they would have told you…

Also I guess is that I would think a post like this is generally counterproductive – it tends to push marginal and controversial (i.e. interesting) posters away from a site, and it rewards the real trolls with a declaration that they are getting inside your head and achieving their aims (i.e. being annoying).

Hopefully I’ll come across as a 10 when I make a comment about 7: This sticks out like a sore thumb as being a type of argument rather than a type of commenter. Surely(I don’t look at this site every day) very few people have this as their stock in trade reply.

More than that, number seven is not just a type of argument, but a valid type of argument. At the very least, pointing out someone who said deficits don’t matter in 2003 when talking about the costs of a military occupation, but who now says deficits matter very much when it comes to stimulus spending indicates just how seriously that particular argument from that particular person should be taken, yes?

Chris, you ignorant slut! You should be overjoyed that we bother to mistake your comments on literary theory for Irish cuisine. Sheesh, what a maroon!

@119: If you know spoken Norwegian – just saying “I’m so depressed” in Norwegian will leave any group of Swedes rolling on the floor laughing.

I don’t know spoken anything (though I can read Icelandic after a fashion, having learned Old Norse). My only firsthand experience with anyone Scandanavian was an elderly female relative by marriage who came to the US in middle life, and while her English was funny it was also entirely delightful to hear. She was the sweetest, kindest, cleanest old lady imaginable — both to look at and listen to, she was like a very expensive and tasteful music box.

(Another datum from Sjöwall and Wahlöö is a murder victim who is said to have spoken Swedish with a comic American accent. Anita Ekberg is given as the type specimen. )

roac at 119, it’s funny you give that anecdote about norwegian sailors – I know a swedish woman who makes exactly the same claim about Norwegian. She refuses to speak it because she feels like she could never be taken seriously ; even reporting the horrible death of her grandfather would sound like she was clowning around.

I wonder if they argue about where the Swedish chef is really from?

@141 Dalarna. In Sweden. And Dalecarlian is one weird dialect. (no, I’m not thinking of ælvdalskan which is even stranger)

This is just typical CT shite. I’d bet you’ve never even driven an Aston Martin and so how would you know? Huh?

And the Palestinians can piss off too.

Since you all seem to be into Scandinavian stuff, check this out the next time you’re in London:

http://www.scandikitchen.co.uk/

I should think commenter-type 7 would be very useful to you!

OK, Chris, what is it? Is there some recent comments thread that didn’t go the way you like? You hint so in comment 87, and I suspect that is what really birthed this thread. If so, why don’t you spell it out, instead of lashing out at the world?

@120:
Actually, I don’t get your point, other than the vague imputation that I’m an irritating commenter, which is likely generally true and I can live with that.

Don’t worry about it: it just made a very funny screenshot when combined with Firefox’s RSS.

This is a rather silly post. What does the writer assume – that commenters who fall into his/her’s 1 to 10 list are going to pull up their socks and straighten their underwear – very unlikely. It comes off as an exercise in pointless grandstanding.

Truth is, it is most often the comment threads in here that make the best reading. The main posts have become increasingly pedantic and boring.

So what if comments don’t meet someone or other’s correctness criteria. Aside from understandable constraints on the more egregious forms of targeting, effing and blinding etc… requirements for comment-thread-correctness are almost always a way of shutting down criticism in an effort to feather-bed the comfort zone of thin skinned types – a few of them with ivory tower complexes.

How about a 1 to 10 nitpicking exercise on the contributors who post in here? Not that it would make any difference.

Crazy eyes killer’s sarcasm (#30) made me laugh… right on.

Well, I can remember having a little disagreement with C. Bertram about vox populi vox dei and/or the use of the word “populist”, which apparently has a different connotation on the other side of the pond. I am U.S. citizen.

But I ought to also say that I very much admire him and consider him an excellent writer, ever since I happened to read a book he wrote about a subject I was interested in, as well as exceptionally thoughtful and conscientious person who really knows his stuff (as far as I can tell, and as far as I can tell, a lot of other people don’t seem to).

On the other hand we non-academics may like to rag members of the professoriat a little — if nothing else just to get back for all we had to put up with back in the day. And I think its true that comments on a blog are more like a party than a classroom. But, for my part, I generally only bother to read and comment on blogs that I like.

Didn’t John Emerson comments used to have their own category?

153.3 It has to be said that this occasionally (if not often) takes the form of enforcing a bourgeois-liberal consensus against any radical position, regardless of facts or actual political realities. I would comment here more often, but it often seems like there’s little point when the weight of opinion falls so heavily in favor of maintaining collegiality over admitting of any difference. Obviously, the preceding does not apply when we’re talking about actual trolling, but the line drawn between trolling and dissidence here is often blurry in the extreme.

Chris obviously hadn’t read the comments to his post before he posted.

Once there are over 100 comments, further comments are pointless. Anybody who reads all preceding comments has no life. Anybody who jumps straight to the last ones is an idiot.

Commenters who, for reasons I shall never be able to fathom, refuse to use capital letters.

can’t speak for anyone else, but when i do it, it usually means i’m drunk