Okay, this really annoys me sometimes; you read a blog post or article, it was interesting, you scroll to the comments section looking for an interesting discussion regarding the content of the post but all you find is countless grammatical or technical corrections contributed by “helpful” readers!
For me, the comments section of a blog post is where users can contribute thoughts concerning the material covered in the post; not spelling mistakes, or a complaint about the site’s content. Apparently not everyone feels this way, because whenever I go to read the comments there’s always a few egotistical children leaving comments about the damn grammar!
Now, I’ve probably done it a couple of times in the past myself but I’ve stopped – I eventually realised I was only doing it to gratify my own needs; I wasn’t really interested in the grammatical correctness of any post – my ego just required a frequent pampering, apparently in the form of grammatical superiority.
Sometimes it may be appropriate to point out these mistakes; if the mistake will cause obvious grief to other readers who take heed from the post then by all means contribute your correction, but if it’s a tiny, barely-noticeable mistake then please keep it to yourself… or, if you feel your alter-ego “Grammar Nazi” kicking in then, by all means, send the owner of the site an angry email.
I have a secret; I delete non-spam comments sometimes! Yes, it’s true! Do you know why? Because this is my website and as such I feel it my responsibility to police the content of it – if a comment is defamatory or just downright rude then I’ll delete it, or if I feel the comment adds absolutely nothing to the post then I’ll delete it. For example, if your comment contains just one word like “Wow!” or “First!” or “Interesting!” then it’ll probably be deleted; why are you wasting your time writing such drivel?
I rarely have a problem though; this is a tiny blog with a tiny readership; something I’ve come to appreciate greatly!
I do feel sorry for the guys at Smashing Magazine! With over 100,000 subscribers they really do get some crap appearing in their comments!
The “first”/”second”/etc posts are so annoying on big sites alright. hhhmm perhaps someone could make a greasemonkey scripts to auto hide those posts?
I generally tend not to delete comments on my own site. If a competitor or a know it all posted and slagged me off then it just shows more about their own personality than anything else. But that’s only my opinion!
In most cases I’ve found the vast majority of commenter’s to be quite friendly and encouraging as I’m sure you have too.
Keep up the great work and, um, “First!”…hehe I kid
I totally agree with this, TechCrunch also have the same problem – half of their comments are people promoting their own alternatives to the application in the article.
In my view anyone who posts ‘First!’ should be permanently banned from the internet because they clearly don’t have the maturity to make any contributions to community.
That’s “damned grammar”, not “damn grammar”.
But seriously, it is indeed annoying to have to skip through that kind of crap. I always prefer comment systems like HN’s, where comments can be down-voted and become progressively less contrasting as the score goes down. I read comments more often on sites that do that, and they seem to have a better sense of community to them, so I dare say that others do the same. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much you can do about internet warriors – by the time they’ve grown out of it they’ve been replaced by the next wave, ready to demonstrate just how clever they are to the world.
One site I used to visit (I forget which), used to edit annoying posts rather than delete them. “First!” posts would have the date edited so that they always appeared last, and the arrogant, rant-y posts had the line “…so in summary, this article annoys me because I feel unloved” added to the end. The joke got old pretty quickly, but the apoplectic rages and accompanying impotent threats from those who had it done to their comments never did
This actually reminds me of a video I saw on College Humor a while back:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1907543
They did a great job of replicating a typical “comments” section on some of the larger sites.
I police my site, but probably more for just things that look spammy. If you just say “Awesome!” and your website address is a company site or a spammy site, then I’ll remove it.
However, if it doesn’t look like you’re spamming and “Awesome!” seems to fit what I posted I’ll leave it. I mean sometimes “Awesome!” is a useful comment for someone trying to decide if what you have to say fits the bill. If I’ve posted some technique for fixing a problem, then perhaps that one word comment is useful to someone trying to decide if what I wrote is right for them.
(Oh yeah, hopefully the above link doesn’t come through as “Spammy”–it just’s what your post reminded me of. I have no association to College Humor.)
Grammatical errors detract from any piece of published material, some people just can’t see beyond the errors.
I am not justifying this type of unnecessary banter, but if a blogger can’t take a few moments to correct grammatical errors in a blog post, how can we trust that they have reviewed the subject matter that they are discussing in their post?
Valid post. I don’t understand why people waste their time with such worthless information such as “first
” !?
I made a decision a while ago to disable comments from my website as I knew I was happy with how the information was being presented. And then if people felt they had some feedback that was relevant and critical to the article then they could contact me regarding the article via email.
I find it works fine that way.
Yeah the comments on Smashing Magazine are incredibly bad. They are in tough position with that, I’m sure.
I delete comments pretty freely myself. Rude comments, absolutely, no question about it, gone. My theory is that if I wouldn’t let you say it in my living room I’m not letting you say it on my blog. And I’m not talking about swearing, I’m talking about general douche baggery.
But even more common are “Nice article!” comments, which are completely useless and also get deleted. Thanks, but in order to keep this discussion useful it needs to be readable.
Did you ever post a photo to Flickr and have some random helpful person add a note to the photo with “Possible crop?” – and it’s not like the photo was posted to a technical photography group, or anything. So outrageously self-absorbed!
I agree with what Sam Shull said about grammatical errors. I seem to have this problem where the moment I see even the slightest grammatical error in a blog article, or even a textbook, I tend to devalue the content of whatever I’m reading. I realize this isn’t right, and I’m getting better, but its frustrating to think they didn’t care enough to proofread. Likewise, when trying to politely give a correction some authors provide no other way to provide feedback other then comments. I always search for a contact email/form if possible.
As for policing comments, I feel the same way about the mass amounts of fluff comments. However, this really seems to be an issue specific to larger websites. I have a small blog and I most certainly don’t have this problem, but I frequent some larger websites where the comments often do contribute greatly to the content… it just takes a lot more work then it should to find those comments! On the other hand, sites like Reddit do a good job with comment quality and it may be because of the ranking system someone else mentioned.
I don’t think the solution is to eliminate comments. That stifles collaboration or makes it 1-1 instead of 1-many. Monitoring all comments can get too unwieldy on large sites. I don’t know yet if there is a good solution for this problem.