Generally I think that the Bus Chick covers manners well, but I thought that this site is both entertaining and informative. I can only assume it is at least partially sarcastic. Reading it got me thinking about this Crosscut piece by Charles Bermant on anonymous comments and rudeness on the internet.
I feel incredibly lucky to have basically the best informed, most polite, most curious, and most civil commenters on the internet. It’s amazing really. The difference is tremendous if you compare to the comment threads on a place like Horse’s Ass, Sound Politics or the Slog. Those are practically anthropology or sociology lessons.
I went to Carless’s site and read this, and I began to think about the way I write. I learned not to attack people personally after my last ranting-on-crosscut-rail-hater post. Ben seemed to have a similar relavation after his last ad hominem rant.
What’s the point of all of this? Well, I want to promise to take the high road in my posts here, something I haven’t always done before. With readers as awesome as we have, and commenters better than any blogger could possibly expect, I owe as much.
Ok, now for a few bits of housekeeping. If your comment doesn’t appear, it’s likely that our spam filter grabbed it. Don’t worry, we’ll bring it back to the site as soon as possible. This has only happened once so far, which is pretty good, but don’t be alarmed or off-put if it happens again. Finally, I want to get your feedback on the threaded comments. I was thinking of putting a toggle in that lets the reader choose whether to display comments in threaded or linear mode. I will get around to it at some point I promise.
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I just noticed the ‘System Maps’ portion of the sidebar- a great idea! I’ve labored to build that into my own ‘bookmarks’, but your sidebar is a lot easier to see and use- in fact, one of the best I’ve seen on any blog.
Naturally I hope that we all remember, when we comment, that someone else has done a lot of work to make the blog possible. Still, there’s no denying that, on a chilly day, a flame-war can look an awful lot like a campfire.
I’ve noticed the archives UI is making the site slow, I’ll fix that when I get back from Europe
It’s an excellent point you raise Andrew. I agree.
One one hand, I think it’s a little silly to worry about being a “concern troll,” obsessed with internet etiquette and politeness. But at the end of the day, the truth is that we pro-transit folk have the argument on the merits, so there’s no need to fight in the gutter.
So while it’s infuriating that people like Brewster at Crosscut, who have positions of authority and influence (Crosscut’s readership is small, but very influential), choose to publish anti-rail screeds by the barrel, I think we can all agree that he and his website are on the wrong side of history here.