Peter Krautzberger · on the web

On reading and writing and silence

[week 4 of the challenge. It's time for a quick post to catch up after last week's delay.]

As you know, this blogging challenge of mine is based on the observation that I would like to write more. And then Jeff Atwood reminds me in this interesting piece that

we badly need to incentivize listening

which makes me wonder if my natural tendency to let things brew for ages might not be a good thing. This blogging challenge will invariably show if I'm actually able to write in decent quality under tighter constraints. (Right now, I'm not so sure.) So perhaps I will have to realize that silence is golden.

On a related note, in recent months, I was forced to think about my comment "policy". This hadn't really come up before since I get very few comments and even fewer from strangers. But I think I should point out that nobody leaving a comment should expect said comment to be posted. Similary, nobody should expect a comment that has been posted to stay up (especially if gets posted automatically after I've allowed a comment in the past). Finally, nobody should expect me to reply to a comment even if I've replied to other comments and even if that happened in the same thread.

This policy has very little to do with trolling, actually, but more with off-topic comments and comments on ancient posts documenting how things have changed (I'm so surprised! not). It's also related to a different point: I'm probably switching off automated comments at some point next year (ooooooh, something will change, hint hint).

The number of worthwhile comments I get is roughly 1 per month (vs 5-10K of spam). So instead of a comment sytem, I'll figure out some way you can quickly send me a comment and then I will add it manually. This move is not just laziness about dealing with spam (it will be slightly more work, I suspect) but also reflects the fact that I consider your comments to be additions to the content, not separate from it. This does not mean that a comment needs to be serious, of course -- silly comments are just as (more?) (more!) relevant to me, so I hope people will keep'em coming.

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