another breed of internet comments

• March 23rd, 2010
• send to twitter
• found in design,
  philosophy+ideas
• tagged with
  blog, comments

Comments on blogs, as a rule, are worthless at best. At their worst, they’re depressing, vile, and counterproductive. We all know The Classic: left under a fake name (or anonymously), with a fake email address, and no URL, The Classic usually, at its most benign, is something like “FAIL!”, or “Any student could do better”. And as I said, that’s at its most gentle. But this many years into this whole internet thing, The Classic is pretty powerless. We all know it, and know to avoid it.

There are lots of other strains of vile internet comments which don’t get as much bad press as they should, though! A recent one I’ve noticed and come to despise is The Challenge. It usually sets up a false comparison of the form “Let’s see you do better!” or “Why isn’t your work posted here, then?”

First, one need not be able to do any better themselves to give substantive feedback on a topic. This is just bad logic. I didn’t volunteer to lead the U.S. Army in Afghanistan when I suggested that sending more troops might not be the best idea. I could be completely wrong in my assertion, but at no point was my perspective an endorsement of my own abilities to do the job in question. Nowhere in my mind did it occur to me that, because I held this position, I could do a better job than a United States Army general.

And second, The Challenge is very easy to refute. The other day I came across a few of these comments and called their bluff: I looked through some of the links to portfolios supplied by the few honest comment authors who were critical of the post. In less than three minutes, I had found quite a few solid portfolios, and one in particular whose work was leaps and bounds better than the work on trial.

The good thing about depressing internet comments is that they usually don’t hold water.

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