Engadget disabled comments on their site because of the trolls, many other sites spend half their time battling people who chose to make others miserable – it’s what the web has become in many corners of netland. MAKE will always have a vibrant community and great comments, that’s a promise I know we can keep. We’re going to post our refined comment policy up in the next 24 hours or so (stay tuned for a great post from Gareth on this). From the start of MAKE, 5+ years ago now, we’ve actively encouraged great discussions and try to jump in to resolve issues in the MAKE comments — so far it’s worked out pretty well — MAKE is a safe place to post in the comments, it’s a safe place to post your projects.
But other places are not and never will be.
This is where “shutup.css” comes in. I just installed it and I love it. It just removes the comments on many sites so you can enjoy the content and not the poop-fest.
I’m not going to pick on any specific site out there, but I think it’s fair for me to say that I think the comments on some electronics-y related sites are pushing people away from sharing their projects lately. There are tons of great projects that make it to many of these sites, the editors do a great job with the sites and content, but there’s just too many people who are determined to make the comments an awful place. shutup.css is now installed, I visit these site more now, even in the few short hours I’ve been using it – they get the page views and I don’t need to accidentally glance at something awful. Eventually I think every site will work towards setting productive tones, it takes time and resources — not everyone has a community manager for their site(s) – until it gets better on some of the sites I frequent, I think I’ll use this comment blocker. shutup.css didn’t come with every site I visit in the list so I needed to edit it. The sites it includes are digg, slashdot, youtube, etc… For youtube, I was using the Feynman quote-comment-replacer, that worked well – but I like this “clean” web without comments even better.
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