Sunday, March 18, 2007
Toward a Better Argument
The problem with blogs these days is that everybody's got one. Everyone who wants a blog can make one easily and for free whether they have something to say or not, so why post your valuable opinion on someone else's where you'll be relegated to a threaded discussion when you can headline your own.
Note that this site lacks any place for you to comment. Because it's not about what you think, it's about what I think.
That being said, what I miss about, say, the early days of Slashdot, are the knock-down drag-out fights that could be found all in one place. In order to find fights like that these days, I'd have to visit nine or ten different sites, and even then everyone might just be getting along.
Even on the wikis you now need to pay pretty close attention before the janitors clean up and throw away all the good civil discourse (apparently Wikipedians don't share everyone else's conviction that it's a great place to argue).
So what we need is a place for good arguments to happen. Knock-down drag-out Emacs is better than vi, Gnome beats KDE, Windows versus Mac, Protestant/Catholic kind of things. And since every argument has (at least) two sides, (at least) two authors should be first-class citizens. And everyone else should have an easy way to gather in a circle and jeer while they see civil discourse at its best.
That is what we need: a big online argument.
I mean, besides the Internet.
Note that this site lacks any place for you to comment. Because it's not about what you think, it's about what I think.
That being said, what I miss about, say, the early days of Slashdot, are the knock-down drag-out fights that could be found all in one place. In order to find fights like that these days, I'd have to visit nine or ten different sites, and even then everyone might just be getting along.
Even on the wikis you now need to pay pretty close attention before the janitors clean up and throw away all the good civil discourse (apparently Wikipedians don't share everyone else's conviction that it's a great place to argue).
So what we need is a place for good arguments to happen. Knock-down drag-out Emacs is better than vi, Gnome beats KDE, Windows versus Mac, Protestant/Catholic kind of things. And since every argument has (at least) two sides, (at least) two authors should be first-class citizens. And everyone else should have an easy way to gather in a circle and jeer while they see civil discourse at its best.
That is what we need: a big online argument.
I mean, besides the Internet.
Labels: argument, blog, shouldbe, wiki
// posted by David @ 1:38 PM 
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