Well that was fun… I picked an opinion that seemed generally useful, wrote about it, submitted it to /r/programming, and got some feedback.
Via Reddit, I received 420 page views (quite a bit higher than my normal 5-10), 3 upvotes, 2 downvotes, one blog comment, and 4 reddit comments.
The feedback was mixed. It’s interesting to me that all of the feedback which I would consider “negative” is based on points that I didn’t intend to make, and some of it seemed a bit absurd. That’s ok though, because it’s great feedback none-the-less, and I like feedback.
Some trends I noticed that I’ll experiment with next article:
1. I ended my article with a prompt which nobody responded to. This may just be an issue of sample size, but it seemed pretty pointless. I’ll not do that next time.
2. I attempted to make two core points in my last article. One point was made (relatively) concisely, while the other was extremely verbose and example-driven. All of the criticism I received was related to the verbose component, while the concise component was either unmentioned or praised. I suspect this is caused by two negative traits of the verbose section: Since it was long, more people skimmed it and thus had a higher chance of misinterpreting my intent or falling back on their existing assumptions; Since it was long, there were more opportunities for me to communicate unclearly or accidently broaden the focus of my article. I’ll get more concise.
3. Examples seemed to strictly hurt me. That may just mean my examples were poor or they implied a lot more than I intended. I’ll try omitting examples next time.
4. Referencing my affiliation with Fog Creek seems (at least based on the tiny set of commenters) to be strictly negative in the scope of blogging. I’ll just omit that in the future… it’s not necessary. I think Fog Creek is awesome, so I tend to reference that, but it’s not necessary, and certainly its quality is higher than that of my articles.
I don’t know what my next topic will be, but I’ll write it with these points in mind.
2 comments:
My blog usually gets a lot of exposure via planet haskell and reddit. One thing I have come to accept about commenters is that a lot of them are jackasses :-P. I infer that there is a large group of people who read technical articles and then make a choice between two options: (1) explain why this is so obvious that saying it was a waste of their time, or (2) get very upset and disagree with strong weasel words. To respond to the latter class in a productive way, I have to be very gentle and draw attention to the source of the misunderstanding in terms of, say, our differing backgrounds or a miswording from my original article. Then I can go on to make an argument that will not be spat at.
There is also a fair amount of misinterpretation, but contrary to yours, in my experience examples typically help. I just have to be very explicit with them: if I am talking about a code transformation, I will rewrite the code at every step and put what I changed in bold. Basically, words talking about a *specific* code sample almost never help -- talk about code with code. Possibly because a lot programming vocab varies slightly for people from different backgrounds.
But I also get a lot of good comments, comparing/contrasting what I've done to papers or techniques from the (extensive) programming toolbox. This is almost exclusively how I did my lazy specialization research: write about it, and commenters would tell me what papers to read next.
Anyway, yeah, reddit's cool. You just have to put up with people who are looking for opportunities to get angry or prove that they are smarter than you.
I hope this convinced you that I am smarter than you. :-P
Hmm, it would be an interesting exercise to write an article with the intent of making the readers feel smart. "This article isn't about me being awesome, it's about why you are awesome. Let me show you...."
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