Derek Powazek on Comments

Derek Powazek:

But your right to post to someone else’s site rests with that someone else. This is so painfully obvious, anyone who doesn’t get it must simply have an axe to grind. It’s like assuming you have the right to go inside any house you can see from the street, and pee on the carpet.

I differ from John in one way. I get the sense from his post and his comments elsewhere that he sees no value in comments at all.

Not quite. It’s not that I dislike comments in general, or view them as useless. They can be useless. They can be excellent. I’m continually impressed by the quality of the comment threads on Hacker News, for example. It is true, though, that I seldom read the comments on sites that offer them.

To restate my thinking, it’s not that I haven’t included comments on DF because I dislike the concept of comments; it’s that comments would not fit with what I have in mind for DF as an experience. Same goes for frequent use of images. I certainly don’t think images are “bad”. They just don’t fit with what I have in mind.

★ Wednesday, 16 June 2010