I don't get enough comments on this blog for me to think
comments on blogs are worthless. But
Joel (and Dave) emphasize an important point about the consequences of anonymous commenting.
Even the most innocent and thoughtful discussions can quickly get derailed, or never even get started (see YouTube commenting). Without accountability, it's easy for me to go around trolling or just hurling random obscenities and LOL!!1!s
Although I've heard this passes for discourse on some sites.
Plus, who's to stop me from flooding every Lisp blog as "spez" with obscenity-and-"LOL!!1!"-laden comments about the lack of widely used and tested Lisp libraries? He already has enough enemies on those blogs. And it'd be especially tragic considering
the thoughtful and articulate explanation of Lisp's shortcomings (and strengths) that he already gave on our dev blog.
He doesn't need any more angry letters or death threats -- I'm the one who opens his mail.
It's with this in mind that I finally upgraded my Blogger template last night (oh boy, 2.0!) and installed
Disqus for all future posts. It's a means for universal discussion across blogs and website in general.
Your identity (and reputation) follow you around and you've got a nice aggregation of all past conversations. If it gets the mass adoption they're aiming for, I suspect it would go a long way toward solving Joel's (and Dave's) problem.
Now let's get meta and discuss Disqus in the new Disqus comments.
