On Deleting Comments

This time we are going into a social territory with a rant mixed in for good measure.

Commenting on someone else's blog for me happens usually when the article/post contains missing details that could be pointed out, or the facts or part of them are dead wrong. This is usually in friendly tone so it's not to be taken as a attack or anything and while doing so I also try to highlight the points that are correct or that I liked. So my comment's are quite big in their size, thus I always copy them to notepad or other tool should the session expire or something bad happen, but if the comment gets posted I remove the file (as it's not needed).

And then after some time I see that the comment is gone …

People that run tech blogs that try to sound expert like delete comments that are hard for them, or expose some of the problems that would undermine their expert status. This sort of things has happened to me a few times and the statistics suggest that the problem is growing. Last year I could count 3-4 instances like that, last month I got 2.  One of my friends had actually every comment deleted from a blog on every post and that just shocking.

I'm very sorry but deleting comments that are not considered spam is just fucking disgusting.

If by deleting no easy to tackle comments you want to retain your expert status and hide some stupid posts or rewrite reality you sir are a fool! and sooner or later you will be exposed.

There is another problem here that if people put some work in making the comment and try to reach out to someone and those comment's get deleted then it's a total discouragement on their side, making them not to want to comment ever again. This would be a total waste as those comments are very meaningful and often correct or expand the article itself making it more useful.

Rewriting the reality is another interesting problem. Someone starts to blog as a beginner, later his considered expert so he goes and edits the old posts and rewrites them without any notice to make them look much better then they actually were, or deletes them entirely. I have written some really stupid shit here and you can still look it up, and I will never ever remove or alter it. First of all my past posts carry some useful information and show from where I started vs where I'm now. Second I encourage everyone to comment and correct wrong information and fill the gaps. In order to be good and write meaningful stuff one needs to start somewhere and possibly write crap (this is not always the case though).

From now on I'm going to not only save my comments but after posting them take screen-shots should they disappear, and then posting about it here.

If you had some instances of deleting comments or rewriting reality happening share them here.