On the difficulties of cross-cultural communication
I speak English. But I speak a certain type of American English. I’m brown. But my culture is American. On a blog like this, these structural problems give rise to particular issues. I actually saw it on the old Sepia Mutiny blog first. Indian English is a distinct dialect not only in accent and lexicon …
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A reply to a stupid, ignorant, or malicious commenter
A commenter below who probably scores OK on an IQ test left a note which is worth responding to. First, “If this was a Christian or Muslim emigrant to US who wanted to marry within religion.” In the original post I focused on marrying within subcaste for a reason. It’s generally socially acceptable to marry within … Continue reading “A reply to a stupid, ignorant, or malicious commenter”
Natural selection in the comments
I’ve been busy with things besides blogging (in any case, this is not my primary blog; I have one I actually get paid to write for another one). But when I read the comments I’m a little surprised at how … Continue reading →
A quick note on comments policy
Happy Memorial Day weekend to Americans. In light of my various time pressures which are going to be operationally indefinite in their temporal scope for me I need to consider various options about optimizing the comments. I generally do rather well on…
Top 20 posts in 2011 by comments for GNXP
In this list I’ve limited it to posts which were published in 2011. For much of the blog’s history I didn’t autoclose comments after 2 weeks, so the comparisons aren’t appropriate. And comments tend to be less timeless in any case. Comments are a double-edged sword on a weblog, because they often invite the stupid […]
Comments getting caught in spam
This occurs every now and then…legit comments without copious numbers of links get caught in the spam filter. Regular commenter Michelle has had her comments tagged as spam twice since she’s changed her back-link URL to Scientific American….
Hold the praise (re: comments)
So over the past few months there has been an issue where manual comment spam is getting more sophisticated. The strategy is to leave an anodyne comment with really vague references to how the post is “great” and “very informativeR…
Comments in the republic of Khan
So today I received an email from regular commenter German Dziebel:
Razib, what’s your relationship with the Discover Magazine? Up until now I thought of your blog as more or less a public forum, rather than a private franchise. Please clarify, s…
Comments
I am taking a more front & center role on this weblog proceeding forward. Moderate/inspection of comments will become stricter. I suspect some of you will be banned because you post worthless comments. Also, I am seriously thinking about installing a plugin that caps word-length on comments. Since this weblog gets about 10 times more …
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