Robert Scoble Laments the State of Tech Blogging
Robert Scoble went on a rant today about the sorry state of Tech blogging. He covered a wide variety of issues, including the influence of PR firms, the lack of fact checking that goes on in a rush to be first, and the inordinate interest in business (the Yahoo deal’s constant place on TechMeme being one of his pet peeves).
One thing he mentioned that I have noticed and bothers me is the consistent low quality of comment posts on blogs and social news sites like Digg, and entertainment sites like YouTube and Break. Okay, maybe it’s expected on entertainment or social news sites, but reading some of the comments on even the best Tech blogs is an exercise in torture a lot of the time. There’s not the ridiculous racism you’ll find on Digg (check the comments on any video featuring a person of color and you’ll see what I mean), but just the “you are an idiot,” “you’re stupid,” “screw you” type of comments that are too ubiquitous to count. There has been a lot of this with the launch of the iPhone.
One example of this was a post contributed by Evan Bartlett to Silicon Alley Insider last week titled “Why I Paid Apple To Take Back My iPhone 3G.” First off, this post is blatant linkbait and was put out only to rile up the iPhone fanbase. But the article was alright, I’ve seen worse. However, the commenters, in what was a pretty tame response in comparison to some I’ve seen, said things like, “What a whiney [sic] bitch.” And that was all the commenter said. Half of the other comments were filled with insults about the writing style, SAI itself, and just general nastiness.
And back to Digg, it’s really hideous what some people say on there. It’s impossible to really have a profession, intelligent dialogue about anything with a bunch of children lobbing bombs from their parents’ basements. But what can you do?
It would be nice to see a better system out the sifted the comments and only posted the intelligent, relevant ones. I know it sounds like censorship but the best blogs every every right to publish what they want on their message boards.
Technorati Tags: robert scoble, tech blogging
