Link tags: comments

Community Guidelines for Kottke.org

I like Jason’s guidelines—very in keeping with The Session’s house rules.

And I really like his motivation for trying out comments:

The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.

As I said in my comment:

Yes! More experiments like this please! Experiments that aren’t just “let’s clone Twitter”.

Frank Chimero · A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But a Compliment Can Go a Long Way

A thousand likes doesn’t look much bigger than one, and this becomes important when considering the form of negativity on social media.

There is no feature for displeasure on social media, so if a person wants to express that, they must write. Complaints get wrapped in language, and language is always specific.

comment parade

A way for you to comment (anonymously, if you wish) on any post that accepts webmentions. So you can use this to respond to posts on adactio.com if you want.

Render Snarky Comments in Comic Sans—zachleat.com

Sounds like Zach had a great time at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf:

I can’t really express how meaningful this experience was to me. An antithesis to the rat race of social media, IndieWebCamp was a roomful of kindred spirits that care about the web and their own websites and hosting their own content. It felt like the Google Reader days again, when everyone was blogging and writing on their own sites. I dunno if you can tell but I loved it.

He also made a neat little plug-in that renders negative comments in Comic Sans with mixed cased writing:

This isn’t intended to be a hot-take on Comic Sans. Instead it’s meant to change the tone of the negativity to make it sound like a clown is yelling at a kid’s birthday party.

Bullet Time

Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute.

A fascinating article by Christina Xu on this overwhelming collaborative UI overlaid on Chinese video-sharing sites:

In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.

Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet.

Sending your First Webmention from Scratch • Aaron Parecki

A nice little tutorial from Aaron.

Herman: Automated Pattern Libraries | OddBird

A lightweight style guide generator. This one uses SassDoc to parse out the documentation for colours, type, etc.

Post Pinging and Webmentions at Midlands Maidens Nottingham Escorts

Okay, this is somewhat odd …it looked like I was getting spam webmentions from an escort agency to an old post of mine. It turns out that technically it’s not spam—they’re genuinely linking to my post from this post on their blog which is actually about webmentions.

And that, your honour, is how this site ended up in my browser history.

The Art of Comments | CSS-Tricks

Great advice on writing sensible comments in your code.

The Coral Project

A Mozilla-backed project for journalists, publishers, and online communities. The Talk part of it is aiming to fix online comments. The Washington Post is going to try it out.

Implementing Webmentions

Drew has been adding webmention support not just to his own site, but any site using Perch. This account of his process is a really good overview of webmentions.

Starting a React-Powered Comment Form | CSS-Tricks

This is a really great screencast on getting started with React. I think it works well for a few reasons:

• Sarah and Chris aren’t necessarily experts yet in React—that’s good; it means they know from experience what “gotchas” people will encounter.
• They use a practical use-case (a comment form) that’s suited to the technology.
• By doing it all in CodePen, they avoid the disheartening slog of installation and build tools—compare it to this introduction to React.
• They make mistakes. There’s so much to be learned from people sharing “Oh, I thought it would work like that, but it actually works like this.”

There’s a little bit of “here’s one I prepared earlier” but, on the whole, it’s a great step-by-step approach, and one I’ll be returning to if and when I dip my toes into React.

Replacing Disqus with Github Comments · Gazoo.vrv

If you’re using Disqus to power the comments on your blog, you might like to know that it’s pulling on loads of nasty tracking scripts. Bad for privacy and bad for performance.

Create awesome styles- Nucleus - Living style guide generator

Another style guide generator that parses comments in CSS.

Let’s Write Beautiful CSS Comments | Sparkbox

If you don’t comment your CSS, you’ll confuse other people looking at your code, and, more embarrassingly, you’ll confuse future you. If you do comment CSS, everybody will be less confused, and things will be accidentally broken less often. You will be popular and generally well-liked, and people will remember to send you cards on your birthday. Comment more.

Some good advice here on how to write better comments in CSS.

jonathantneal/mdcss

A tool for generating a pattern library from Markdown comments in CSS. This isn’t the way that I tend to work, but I can see how it would be quite handy.

How can we fix internet comments?

Here’s an interesting approach to making comments more meaningful:

Instead of blindly publishing whatever people submit, we first ask them to rate the quality and civility on 3 randomly-selected comments, as well as their own. It’s a bit more work for the commenter, but the end result is a community built on trust and respect, not harassment and abuse.

Want to help prevent online bullying? Comment on Facebook

Proving something that Derek Powazek told us 15 years ago:

When we clearly show what is and is not acceptable, the tone does change. People who want to share thoughtful comments start to feel that theirs are welcome, and people who want to spew hatred start to realize theirs are not.

D’hear that, Reddit?

Send emails to any domain, receive messages at your domain@questo.email

This is a nifty little service: if your site has a webmention endpoint, people can comment on your articles by sending an email.

That means you can comment on any post on my site by sending an email to adactio.com@questo.email (in the email, include the URL of the post you’re commenting on).

as days pass by — Enabling Webmentions

Stuart has implemented webmentions on his site, which is great. It’s also fitting, as he is the inventor of pingback (of which webmention is a simpler reformulation).