Joel’s Improved Personal Website
Accepting Footnotes
Most posts on this site now accept submissions for additional footnotes. If something in a post jogs your memory, or reminds you of an experience or something in a book which sheds further light on the subject, we invite you to make the connection for other readers by submitting a footnote.
We review all footnotes before publishing them. We usually take our sweet time about it too, so you might as well take yours when writing them. A well-considered and thoughtful post is likely to be published. In order for your footnote to be accepted, it must be substantive, relevant content in its own right. Keep in mind, you are not “commenting” on the original, but actually being invited to try adding to it. Footnotes that add insight or draw new connections have a good chance of being accepted; simple statements of opinion do not have much chance (even if they are nice opinions!). Obvious marketing and incivilities will be shot on sight.
This model is a bit of an adaptation of the normal comments system found on most blogs. The two most common approaches are either to allow any comments that aren’t clearly abusive or spammy, or to allow no comments at all. For many years, I felt that in the case of this site, neither option was ideal; but I defaulted to disallowing comments entirely for lack of any other ideas. It’s been apparent for a long time, however, that a significant slice of the readers and passersby here could not properly enjoy the ideas without participating in some way.
Much of my writing involves making connections between seemingly disparate ideas (or at least what I hope are artful attempts at doing so). The “curated footnotes” model, which has been tried successfully elsewhere, at last allows thoughtful readers to participate along the same lines.
Two of the best examples of this “reader submission” model that I know of are Edward Tufte’s Ask ET Notebooks (written about at length in his article Moderating Internet Forums ) and the user notes on PHP’s online reference.
— Joel (February 8, 2011)
Matt Gemmell has recently examined the issue of whether and how much on-site comments add to the value of articles in practice. In his article Comments Off, he ends up on the side of turning them off entirely, saying that authors now have other options for engagement with readers, such as responses on twitter or on blogs.
The main problem I see with this is that when the ensuing discussion is conducted via Twitter or scattered blog posts, it is not collected or collated anywhere. It’s interesting while it lasts; but a week later the discussion as a whole has effectively vanished like a vapour, and it is very hard to track down again, even assuming you are aware it existed. This is little better than having no engagement at all; it can never add lasting value to the original article, unless the author assumes the burden of collecting and curating every follow-up tweet and blog post and appending them to the original – which resembles comment moderation far too closely to offer any real advantage.
My own approach doesn’t avoid the problem of placing the burden of moderation on the site author, but it does offer a middle ground between the all-or-nothing paradigm that seems to prevail in these discussions. As long as expectations are properly conveyed to readers, it is not hard to allow participation while still maintaining high-quality engagement that adds permanent value to your site.
— Joel (December 5, 2011)