Comments on: I respectfully disagree

By: Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:57:14 +0000

Yeah, I think it is cool on LiB, too. Calling them annoying was unfair of me–it just makes the comments feed very noisy!

By: rochelle

rochelle — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 02:50:47 +0000

Everyone once in awhile I will insert a comment, just to say hi, or to remind them to be nice if they get a little flamey, but they are squatters and could care less about me! I get a big kick out of it, though.

By: walt

walt — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 02:11:54 +0000

Rochelle, That’s interesting. I just checked two prolific kid’s-lit blogs; one gets almost no comments, the other gets a fair number, but rarely more than 10 or 11 per post. I wonder if it’s because you were writing about a teen book–and because you usually *don’t* write about kid’s lit. Curious.

By: rochelle

rochelle — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:52:41 +0000

Steve–glad you said that about comments. The same thing happened on my blog. I posted about a teen fantasy book, and the fans have taken over that thread as their own personal message board. I’m sure there are near 1000 comments on the thread, even though the story is 16 months old! And there are at least a couple comments a day, and sometimes up to ten. I’m not sure how Typepad subs work, though. I don’t think people can subscribe to just my comments.

By: Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:47:27 +0000

Walt, one of the reasons I come back to comment here multiple times is because I subscribe to your comment feed. I only realized that WordPress has comment feeds enabled by default when I switched myself recently.

I just picked up the comment feeds for librarian.net, goblin in the library and the Other Librarian, so we’ll see how that goes. I remember I subscribe to the comments feed for Librarian in Black, but had to stop because she had one post about kids lit that kept getting all these annoying comments every day.

By: walt

walt — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:38:21 +0000

I feel the need to say, pretty much, “I agree with all of you, and isn’t this turning out to be an interesting conversation?” I certainly agree with Joshua (hey, in comments I can first-name) that there was a bit of raised-pinky about the original complaint.

One could even say that the particular complaint sucks . But then, I’ve never accepted the idea that “sucks” is anything other than acceptable strong language, and since I failed to have it drummed into me as a child that women are a separate and inferior species, I’ve never thought that women should somehow be constrained about speaking their minds as they choose.

I dunno. Maybe I should subscribe to a few comment feeds, but that feels like it would expand the number of posts a little too much for comfort. But it’s an idea.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:15:22 +0000

I’m almost always politer in comments than I would be on my own blog (and use nicer language too) because I feel that I’m in someone else’s living room. As someone who has a job of moderating comments for a giant forum I’ve learned a bit about how to still get your point across without going over the top and how to tell someone you don’t agree with them without them feeling like you’ve personally insulted them. I generally feel like it’s possible to disagree without offending, but I’ve worked for people — in the library world and outside it — who see any disagreement or complaint as rude, no matter what the tone or the content and I’m never sure what to do with people like that.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:37:20 +0000

Bah. If I’m going to be mean, it might as well be physical. My recent tirades in Hockey have prevented me from being anything but nice in the biblioblogosphere.

But if you notice people getting bodychecked at a library conference, you’ll know I’ve arrived.

In all honesty (and I can’t say I always live by this code), I prefer to say only those things that I would say to someone’s face in a bar. I also like to pretend that the person is bigger than I am for good measure. As in: would you be willing to take a black eye to get that rude point across?

By: joshua m. neff

joshua m. neff — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:36:11 +0000

Iâ€™m trying very hard to avoid first-naming except when Iâ€™m joshing someoneâ€“no, Neff, that wasnâ€™t aimed at you

What? WHAT? Why I oughtta…

Actually, I do subscribe to the comments of blogs I like (when the blogging software does allow easy comment subscription), because one of the main things I love about blogs (and you know this well, Walt) is the conversational aspects. Also because I am a l33t librarian blogger!

At any rate, I would say I dislike rudeness and admire candor. If people are going to comment on my blog, they better show me some respect, because…well, it’s my blog and I hold all of the winning cards.

But I do think that chiding women for using the word “sucks” (which is what set off this round of impolite blogging) is way too Victorian for my tastes.

By: walt

walt — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 15:37:47 +0000

Wow. A rare three-banger. You left out l33t or whatever the heck it’s called. You may have noticed that I didn’t really make a resolution; I pretty much stopped doing that.