In deference to my British employers, I’ll use their word.
It constantly strikes me how rude, stupid, and unfriendly people can be on the Internet. I’ve been trying to avoid even reading comments on many places, including Facebook because I’m struck by how people behave. I haven’t completely succeeded and things still strike me at times.
Like today, I saw this tweet.
I read part of the article and then scrolled down to see the comments. This was what I saw:
I get that you might not like the format. Personally I didn’t love it and didn’t read the entire article. However I also recognize that this was a story and designed to present information in a new style. Even the opening leads one, or at least me, to understand this is a story, not a quick technical article.
I suspect that bad behavior is often because of the anonymous nature of comments. Or maybe it’s because the writers are so far removed from others they feel no social contract to mind their manners. Perhaps it’s the ease with which one can toss off their first thought and condemn the rest of us to suffer through it.
If you don’t like something, that’s fine. You get to pick and choose which pieces you want to read and which ones you like. However it’s also easy to just click away to something else and not leave a comment. I’ll paraphrase a few lyricists here (Jay-Z and Salt n Pepa),
If you don’t like the writing, you can click back, close the tab, or turn away from the computer.
Disclosure: I work for Red Gate, and we do want to sell software. That’s how we pay the bills and keep Simple Talk and SQLServerCentral running. We also are a part of the community. We want to teach you. We want you to get better at your jobs, and yes, we want to entertain you.
Please let us know what you like and don’t like, but there’s no nefarious purpose to trick you. If you like our tools, or those of our competitors, and they are worth the price, we hope you buy them.
