Food for thought
18 Challenges in Contemporary Literature
Honestly, I have not checked the comments, so I am not endorsing them.
P.S. It is totally a dick move to close comments because you're getting told. Everyone will think less of you when you do it, and you will deserve to fall in everyone's esteem.
Just because it is a dick move, does not necessarily mean it is not the lesser of several evils. If you can tell that you are just FAILING HARDER in the comments, clearly you need to stop talking, and you may feel that it is important to clearly and unequivocally establish that you have STOPPED LISTENING.
Also, just because you fail, even in a highly privileged way, it does not always mean you have the ability to interact with other people right at your moment of fail. Even tall, straight, white, rich, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgendered, Christian men have, on occasion, genuinely worse things going on in their lives than an internet spanking they richly deserve, and if that internet spanking comes on top of too many other personal disasters, they may simply not have the resources to deal with it in any fashion. Stopping the incoming critique, however well-deserved, may be your only option for surviving the other personal disasters; you are not obligated to reveal to anyone on the Internet the existence or severity of these personal disasters.
Last but not least, if your close friends and acquaintances start failing all over the comments for you, your only option to stop them failing on your behalf in a manner which you appear to endorse may be to cut off their ability to comment in your space on the issue of fail.
That being said (to sum up: hiding comments/privating entry is a dick move; the dick move may be the least terrible move you have), people who say that turning the comments private renders them silent are being, uh, disingenous at best.
Livejournals are still free. Google sites are still free. Blogger blogs are still free. Wordpress blogs are still free. If someone who commented in your original post has something to say and they want to tell the whole damn internet about it, they have the technical ability.
If you see a contentious discussion on an LJ-clone or DW-clone, screen cap the post (format=light versions tend to get the best results. If you want all the comments so far, view=flat may be your best bet to do it fast, thread by thread is probably your best bet for people to be able to reconstruct the conversation) and then start tracking the comments, getting them e-mailed to you. Heck, if you think you've said something particularly brilliant in the comments of any blog, repost it in the space you control.
It is the normal operation of the internet that anyone who hosts comments can choose to make those comments disappear, and depending on the good intentions and fine heart of someone you just told is only going to end in you losing comments you thought were important.
Quote, link, and repost to your own space. That's how you make sure that your words don't disappear.
This entry was originally posted at http://zvi.dreamwidth.org/523390.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Honestly, I have not checked the comments, so I am not endorsing them.
P.S. It is totally a dick move to close comments because you're getting told. Everyone will think less of you when you do it, and you will deserve to fall in everyone's esteem.
Just because it is a dick move, does not necessarily mean it is not the lesser of several evils. If you can tell that you are just FAILING HARDER in the comments, clearly you need to stop talking, and you may feel that it is important to clearly and unequivocally establish that you have STOPPED LISTENING.
Also, just because you fail, even in a highly privileged way, it does not always mean you have the ability to interact with other people right at your moment of fail. Even tall, straight, white, rich, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgendered, Christian men have, on occasion, genuinely worse things going on in their lives than an internet spanking they richly deserve, and if that internet spanking comes on top of too many other personal disasters, they may simply not have the resources to deal with it in any fashion. Stopping the incoming critique, however well-deserved, may be your only option for surviving the other personal disasters; you are not obligated to reveal to anyone on the Internet the existence or severity of these personal disasters.
Last but not least, if your close friends and acquaintances start failing all over the comments for you, your only option to stop them failing on your behalf in a manner which you appear to endorse may be to cut off their ability to comment in your space on the issue of fail.
That being said (to sum up: hiding comments/privating entry is a dick move; the dick move may be the least terrible move you have), people who say that turning the comments private renders them silent are being, uh, disingenous at best.
Livejournals are still free. Google sites are still free. Blogger blogs are still free. Wordpress blogs are still free. If someone who commented in your original post has something to say and they want to tell the whole damn internet about it, they have the technical ability.
If you see a contentious discussion on an LJ-clone or DW-clone, screen cap the post (format=light versions tend to get the best results. If you want all the comments so far, view=flat may be your best bet to do it fast, thread by thread is probably your best bet for people to be able to reconstruct the conversation) and then start tracking the comments, getting them e-mailed to you. Heck, if you think you've said something particularly brilliant in the comments of any blog, repost it in the space you control.
It is the normal operation of the internet that anyone who hosts comments can choose to make those comments disappear, and depending on the good intentions and fine heart of someone you just told is only going to end in you losing comments you thought were important.
Quote, link, and repost to your own space. That's how you make sure that your words don't disappear.
This entry was originally posted at http://zvi.dreamwidth.org/523390.html. Please comment there using OpenID.