How to Deal With Obnoxious Blog Comments

Matt Asay, an executive who writes CNET's Open Road open source blog, got so mad at commenters on his site yesterday that he began hunting them down:

... most people are not jerks. They just become losers when cloaked in anonymity. They say things they'd never say if confronted with the people they flame on discussion boards, in comments sections, etc. They're probably nice people "in real life." It's just on the web that they let it all hang out, to the detriment of the web and intelligent discussion.
Take the comments to one of my recent posts. The first is led off by "h3h" who apparently has no sense of humor (completely missing my point in the post), but can't leave it at that, then going on to lob ad hominems into his "argument."
"H3h" turns out to be Brad Fults. Judging from his Flickr feed and Twitter feed, he's probably an OK guy. He happens to be wrong in the way he chose to comment on this blog, but he's probably a well-intentioned person, normally.

Asay doesn't seem to understand the concept of anonymity. Fults' comments on CNET include a link to his web site, which contains his name and is presumably how Asay found it.

Anyone who reads Workbench knows that I get my fair share of anonymous abuse, particularly from people who read my Target story and let me know I'm a bad parent. That never gets old.

If you publish on the web and accept user comments, you're going to be a punching bag for a steady procession of dillweeds. Your choices are to stop taking comments, pick them off one by one like Asay, or just keep telling yourself you're a beautiful snowflake and soldier through it.

Credit: The photo of Matt Asay was taken by Ilya Schurov of Computerra Weekly and is available under a Creative Commons license.

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Link: http://feeds.cadenhead.org/~r/workbench/~3/326614315/deal-obnoxious-blog-comments
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How to Deal With Obnoxious Blog Comments

How to Deal With Obnoxious Blog Comments - témata

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