Re: No general political content on Planet

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> > Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>
> >> The little minus next to someone's name seems to deal with that
> >> reasonably well if one doesn't feel up to ignoring it.
>
> > I get no “little minus” next to anyone's name on the Planet Debian
> > syndication feed. Are you perhaps conflating the interface-independent
> > information content of Planet Debian with a single interface to that
> > information?
>
> Yes, that's what I was referring to.
>
> FWIW, this bit came across as very condescending and immediately made
> me angry and defensive, although I got over it. The correction also
> seems somewhat unnecessary, since you seem to have understood what I
> meant. I was pointing out an interface feature that in the past some
> readers haven't known about, for those people who (like I do) go
> directly to the web site, and this sort of aggressive-sounding
> correction mostly just makes me less likely to post information I
> think could be helpful in the future.

Not my intention. I found your assumption that all Planet Debian readers
would see a little minus to be quite parochial, so I wanted to find out
whether that was the case.

I didn't take offense, and didn't intend to cause it.

> If you had instead phrased your response more along the lines of "that
> works if you're reading directly from the web site

I didn't know that to be the case, and wasn't motivated to experiment.

> Anyway, presumably decent feed reader software either has or could
> have added to it a similar feature to suppress particular posts from
> the collective feed by various criteria. The authorship information is
> in the feed for a feed reader to do something with.

That seems an unreasonable place for the burden. It seems similar to
claims that people who don't like off-topic posts can just delete them.
True, but irrelevant to the point that off-topic posts are being made.

Again, though, I'll note that I don't consider all off-topic traffic
necessarily bad; merely that “configure your client better” is a poor
response.

-- 
 \       “If you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to |
  `\          buy a new iPod at least once a year.” —Steve Jobs, MSNBC |
_o__)                                             interview 2006-05-25 |
Ben Finney