I'm sure this is not the correct way to ask but still, I just logged in to ask you this: Can you guys please add this feature other consoles have where you can use the mouse scroll-wheel to add or substract to CSS properties on the console? IE. font-size, border size, width, etc.
That would disallow you from voicing that opinion so succinctly.
Instead, you would have to add a line that either gives more depth to your opinion (why do you think it would help?) or that just serves as use,es filler. I bet many people would opt for the latter, as it is easier to write.
Unfortunately, I don't think we have technology to measure the amount of content in a comment.
I'm not sure about that. If you take a look at (for example) the awful change on Stack Overflow made by Shog9 to mitigate short comments (and what he believes are therefore bad comments), you'll see the huge backlash and also notice how many people can and do leave thoughtful comments with only a single line or less. I think it is an impossible problem to judge the quality of content by its quantity. The +1 comment is an extremely niche type of comment "problem" that can be mitigated successfully by outsourcing the functionality to a simple upvote widget, but I think that's as far as you can get in judging comment quality without making very broad statements that quash some quality content by mistake.
Honestly, Shog9 is the single biggest reason why my participation in Stack Exchange has dwindled to prettymuch nothing. It's as if he wakes up one morning and decides "I know! I'll make a huge change to Stack Overflow that will piss thousands of users off! ^-^"
What's just as annoying is that as far as I'm aware, he has never admitted that he's been wrong about anything. Ever.
Which is pretty disappointing since originally their mission statement seemed to be that they wanted to escape that mindset (most of the original team came from Engadget and such).
I don't like having private conversations on twitter for some reason, I guess having it is better than not but it's hard to feel excited about it. On the bright side I think this could be very useful for networking between famous people.
People have generally stopped visiting blogs. Even stand-alone web sites are starting to suffer.
I recently re-enabled my Facebook account for dev purposes, and while there liked the Verge, AnandTech, etc. So now my feed is a small amount of family stuff, and a long list of tech news, most of which I quickly scroll past.
It's interesting because I essentially never visit those sites any more. Not long ago I visited the Verge probably daily, and browsed into random stories. I visited Anandtech weekly. And so on. Now I see the headlines that I skip past, and that's that.
And on the pure blog front, a lot of people rely upon sites like HN and reddit to sift through the chaff, the idea being that those killer blog posts will rise to the top. We know that isn't actually true (HN is mostly about luck and pet topics, with a lot of terrible content rising, while Reddit is horribly, horribly gamed), but the end result is that the good content suffers.
Have people "generally stopped visiting blogs?" Do "a lot" of people rely on HN?
Internet usage is 39% globally [1]. I doubt there are any statements you can make that apply to 2.85 Billion People. Feels like you are ascribing your personal opinion/beliefs/experiences to "people" in general.
Is this an example of someone adding an irrelevant citation to try to add an air of authority where they have none?
Technology blogs used to be fairly significant ventures. Now there are shockingly few that are still maintained, and even those (such as Coding Horror) detail dramatic declines in readership.
Every reality goes against your garbage post. Yet still you did it. Weird. HN gets stupider by the day.
You kind of have to keep up a regular cadence of new content to get people to keep coming back. For instance, Coding Horror has had only 9 posts in the last six months. For the most part, I don't revisit programming/software dev blogs unless there is new content or there is something relevant that I want to go review again. Ergo, if you write most of your posts on the latest teacup-hurricane scandal or the newest version of X software/hardware product, you aren't going to get the kind of long tail that sustains page views when your posting rate slows down. On the other hand, if you are producing quality content that stands the test of time (something like lazyFoo's SDL tutorials comes to mind), then you are going to move up the search rankings on that topic, which will reinforce that long tail.
For sure, but in a way it's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. Spend lots of time making content to see the same sputter and occasional luck on the social news sites.
There was a time a few years ago when you could ask what the best tech blogs where and there would quickly be thousands of posts. Now...most of those have been abandoned, and little has appeared in their place. Even among professional sites it's amazing how many technologies (for instance Intel's tablet chips) get almost no treatment at all, and astonishingly little actual effort is expended, so we just end up with some vapid, high-level commentary that is then blog spammed across autonomously created dupe sites.
It's just a wastelands. People stopped coming and people stopped being interested.
