On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 8:51 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by samth
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I love writing flames, but I (almost) never post them. It's rather cathartic.

Whenever I see something I find really stupid, I write a long rant about it, then proof-read it, then finally discard my reply.

After that I write (or not, depending on whether I have any input that actually hasn't been repeated 100x already) my real reply and submit that instead.

Works surprisingly well.

Imagine how much calmer mailing list discussion and online forums would be if there was a "Please wait 5 minutes, re-read your post (and the post you reply to), wait 5 minutes more to have the send button activate" policy...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 11, 2014 5:26 UTC (Sat) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

I do this too. Even LWN's "Preview Comment" requirement with no timer at all is sufficient for me to reconsider what I wrote. Probably 90% of my posts here I decide aren't sufficiently original or non-obvious (or polite :P) to be worth sending.

And I always wonder whether the editors can see posts that were previewed but not posted..