What I Learned From My 15 Milliseconds
A recent kerfuffle gave me a chance to observe today’s web in action. Here’s what I learned.
Lesson 1: Leverage
This site serves roughly a hundred people a day looking, I presume, for thoughts on programming. I posted my response to Mr. Spolsky on a Sunday evening. The next morning at 6 when I checked in I was astonished to find 2,000 visits looking at my message. By 10 in the morning that number had reached 15,000. That’s two orders of magnitude in a day. When it became apparent that I wasn’t interested in a spitting match, though, the visits stopped immediately–two orders of magnitude the other way. Here’s the data:
Traffic Spike
Lesson 2: Reddit Drives Traffic
The amplifying effects of services like Reddit become clear when examining the sources of the traffic. Reddit mediated the majority of the visits, followed by direct links (not sure where these came from) and news.ycombinator.com. Again, the data:
Traffic Sources
Lesson 3: Civility?
Many of the comments passed all bounds of civility. Sexual metaphors and foul language were common. I was relieved to come across a comment that was merely illogical. On the whole I found the comments on news.ycombinator.com thoughtful and constructive. It makes me a bit wistful for the days when people were compared to Hitler and Stalin, though.
Lesson 4: Fight, Fight!
From the comments it became clear that people wanted to watch a fight. I was told that it was my duty to respond in detail, even though Joel’s original comment was a throw away, not a reasoned argument. What surprised me was the sense of entitlement: you owe us a slagging match. No, I don’t. If you’d like to talk about software design, though, I’m up for that.
Lesson 5: Question Identity
One of the first comments I reviewed first thing in the morning purported to be from Joel. It had his email, web site, and little picture. It was crude, but I passed it through. On checking with him, it was clear that it was forged. I deleted it. Lesson learned: I don’t have to pass through any comments that don’t contribute to the discussion and I need to be suspicious of all outrageous comments.
Conclusion
Earlier in my career I worked hard to attract attention. I consciously turned away from this pursuit because of the hollowness of achieving it and the cost. Today’s web is a playground for attention seekers. I can feel the tug, still. If I had wanted attention out of this situation, all I would have had to do is turn up the heat: call Joel a few names, write a long, detailed rebuttal, and poke at the fanboys who responded. The problem with this approach is that eventually it all burns down to ashes and no one knows a thing more about software development than they did before.
Great post, traffic jump phenomena is always an interesting topic as seen by the “Colbert Bump” http://tinyurl.com/368wue. I also agree that if you created your blog to get famous for slamming others then good for you, call it YouAllSuckAndIWin.com, but otherwise keep your integrity and promote software development!
The preference for civility, and the refusal to be dragged into childish poop-flinging, are wonderful in their own right. Thank you.
AND I am interested in how web tech might evolve to help us evolve civil communities of trust. I want my community of trust to attract folks at a similar level of consciousness; I want it to naturally repel the poop-flingers.
I want web tech to reward collective, collaborative discussion and sharing, and repel the cult of the individual. I want the web tech equivalent of the small, shy, rural eco-village, that folks take the trouble to visit for the right reasons, and then choose to inhabit more permanently for the right reasons.
Thanks for this, Kent. I found this quote to carry the most weight for me:
I consciously turned away from this pursuit because of the hollowness of
achieving it and the cost.
Well said. I can relate. For me, it’s a hard lesson to apply consistently (until, I can only hope, I mature a bit).
I’ve learned a lot about working with software from you, but I think I’ve learned more about working with humans. I look forward to learning more.
Earlier in my career I worked hard to attract attention. I consciously turned away from this pursuit because of the hollowness of achieving it and the cost.
Here here!!
It’s interesting that I have exactly the opposite experience. Early in my career, I wasn’t trying to get attention at all. I eventually got tired of not being noticed, not getting credit for anything and being pushed around by people who had no idea what I was capable of.
That doesn’t mean I disagree with you in this specific case. I totally reject “childish poop-flinging”, and this particular dogfight was clearly caused by too much superficial judgment. But I do find it useful to express strong opinions, sometimes to the point of painting it a bit too vividly. I’ve discussed this at http://is.gd/jN9e.
Well, but thanks to that spike, there is probably more people like me, which care about your work and is now informed about this new venture.
Maybe all that attention wasn’t bad at all.
I’m sure the attention wasn’t bad but it is hard to read vitriol without feeling a bit of pain, a bit of sadness.
I was kind of hoping you’d pull Marshall McLuhan out from behind a movie poster to rebut Spolsky. The web is a hot medium.
[...] 조엘의 인
I think you missed a great opportunity.
I’m a follower of Joel’s podcast, and I noticed sometimes he says things somewhat to quickly, but hey, it is like we listen to a telephone call. Perhaps I missed the particular episode you referred to, at least cannot recall what you respond to. I do remember the name JUnit, so at least the name stick (so maybe I did hear the episode).
Finding your response (post 29) on accident (by googling for joel spolsky), I read it and though ‘hey this is interesting’, but there was no actual content at all in that post. So I was none the wiser whatsoever about JUnit than what I heared from Spolsky. I found this page by searching for ’spolsky’ on your blog to see whether you had written some more in depth text at a later time.
But no, you only write that you do not want to go into a mudfight. I don’t want to read a mudfight, I want to learn more about JUnit. Perhaps especially in respect to whatever Spolsky said about it (because I ‘know’ who that is). I think most of the 15000 visitors just wanted to learn more, but you missed the opportunity to teach them. You could have written a reply without name calling. There were not even pointers to other places with information in these two articles.