Thursday, September 23, 2010

Thread for personal criticism

If I write a post about some game, news, or game design theory or philosophy, and you post a comment in it calling me an idiot, or questioning my "journalistic integrity", I am going to delete your comment with a visible notice "this comment has been deleted by blog administrator". If you then complain about evil censorship, I'm goint to delete that comment as well.

The reason is not (just) that I don't like being personally criticized, but that personal attacks are the usual way on the internet to say "I don't agree with you, but I can't come up with any viable argument against what you said". Make an outrageous enough ad hominem attack, and any discussion thread will quickly derail into discussing that attack, and the arguments of the original post are forgotten. For this reason I am going to continue deleting personal criticism comments in other threads, and ask you in all those threads to try to formulate only comments which do not contain the words "Tobold" or "you".

But not in this thread. If you really feel the need to launch some personal criticism at me, whether that is about my level of intelligence, my "journalistic integrity", or some element of style (e.g. fake news) I use and that you find inappropriate, this is the place to do it. Just don't be surprised if I answer some insult in a similar manner (somehow people who insult others on the internet are always surprised to be insulted back and then complain that answering back in the same style is inappropriate).

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