One of the coolest things about posting at Freakonomics is the chance to be educated by your high-quality comments, which add to our posts and sometimes correct our mistakes.
But to be honest, every once in a while I have been depressed by the harsh general tone of criticism. (For example, the comments here got me down. To be specific, it’s not that commenters sometimes disagree with a post; it’s that they claim that the post is insufficiently related to Freakonomics-type thinking.)
Peter Ubel suggested that some of these comments may be the byproduct of Google Alerts and not come from regular readers of this blog. In an earlier post, I made a mistake in describing how often the open-source statistical software, R, is updated, and dozens of knowledgeable R users appropriately corrected me. I’m betting that most of these comments came from Google Alerts (plus indirect links on message boards). The Google Alerts comments are real comments, and as this example shows, they are often helpful comments.
For some reason, it eases my mind to think that some of my flaming may come from Google Alerts instead of from regular readers of this blog.
It might be interesting to have a public signal about whether the comment was based on an alert or not. An indirect signal would be for Google to create an “Alert Trends” feature. Alert Trends would allow you to find out how many people had signed up for Alerts on particular character combinations (just like the existing Trends feature lets you know how many people have searched for a particular character combination).
Using this feature, bloggers could figure out how many alerts a particular post generates. Knowing this might improve distort this marketplace of ideas as authors goose their language to increase their Google Alert readership.
Google Alerts is also a great substitute for email, at least for the thousands of academics, journalists, and webheads who have alerts on their own names. Quasi-famous people who might not have time to read your email might read a Google Alert post that includes their name. To wit:
Hi John Dickerson,
I really loved your Slate article on Obama‘s donor database. It would be incredibly non-burdensome for the Obama webheads to disclose the three million donors that gave less than $200.
It’s better than even money that, thanks to Google Alerts, John will read these words.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
The comments are one of my favorite things about this blog. I don’t always agree with what people say, but the level of knowledge and tone of conversation are awesome. It’s probably not much comfort, but the flame wars here aren’t nearly as off-putting to me as those on other blogs.
Although the post on wedding rings was acrimonious, it never hit the level that I stopped reading. There are some academic blogs that I won’t click through from my rss aggregator because of the comments – there was one that conflated homosexuality and child abuse.
My only real complaint about the comments is that when I hit tab from inside the window it takes me to the top of the page instead of the submit button. And that’s pretty minor.
Hot button issues seem to bring out some people who don’t seem to be regulars… In the wake of Prop 8, gay marriage is about as hot button as they get.
Ian,
If it’s any consolation, I thought your article was one of the best I’ve read all year on the Freakonomics blog.
A proud reader
Just wanted to chime in that I really like the posts from you and Justin Wolfers.
Dubner’s been okay lately, but Levitt seems to be short on time. His posts tend toward random weblinks these days rather than the economics speculation and news (especially when it’s not about macroeconomics) I like to find when I come to Freakonomics.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Ian,
Jonathon is soooo correct!
“4. “Drive-bys.” In one discussion group I’m involved with if something negative reaches the headlines then we get drive-by posters who want to chime in. The problem isn’t that they post but that they are usually nasty, even to the crackpot end of the scale.”
I’ll betchya drive-bys are 95% of harsh criticism. For some reason this seems to relieve people of their anger. Basically, they’re dumping on you. And…you don’t deserve it.
hang in there,
jim
Mr. Ayres,
I am a daily reader of this blog, and consider it among the best on the Internet. I am also of the mind that the majority of your posts don’t belong here. At your best, you focus on things only tangentially related to freakonomics-type thinking. At your worst, your opinions are downright contrary to that school of thought. I would count your gay marriage post solidly among the latter.
I happen to be pro-gay marriage myself, but I don’t come here to read about it. My humble suggestion would be to start your own blog, which like-minded readers can patronize if they so choose.
I agree with Hilary.
The comments here are just about as important to me as the subject matter itself. I also have a couple gripes regarding the infrastructure of the page: I wish there was a search function within comments; I wish we could go back to the days before we had 25 comments per page (so we could manually search if no search function existed), but I deal.
Hopefully Ian you can tell who your true frequenters are and who isn’t. I recognize several names/aliases that tend to read and post on the same articles that I do, and it’s definitely true that there is at least a community developing on my very micro scale. There is no better place that I’ve found to have quick, interesting, unconventional, but economically-based discussions with a generally politically mixed crowd (although I tend to feel that there are more conservatives like me these days… not surprisingly). Not to brown nose but several of my favorite articles of the blog have been yours. Most recently the dollar auction article about Swoopo.com spawned discussion and conversation between me and my co workers for about a week, and caused me to write a blog post of my own.
Flamers come and go. If someone flames and is gonna stick around to make sure their opinion counts, they’re going to have to defend it… with enough discussion they might even be assimilated into the community itself! Ultimately though you shouldn’t worry. You’ve got a pretty strong community from what I’ve seen and it’ll take a lot for us to abandon something we enjoy.
Mr. Ayres
With all due respect: politics has never been a subject for calm and reasoned debate – the game does not get played that way by any faction. Partly that is a result of the fact that a lot of political disagreement reflects a differences in views as to the underlying facts. Without a common set of axioms, there can be no reasoned debate.
When you post on a subject as politically explosive as gay marriage you should be neither surprised nor disappointed if some of the comments are a bit (ahem) forceful.
If you walked into a biker bar, climbed on a table and shouted: “you’re all sissies”, would you be surprised if someone bounced a beer bottle off your head? Same goes for a blog post. If you start trying to pick fights (which your blog post about gay marriage did) don’t be surprised when the metaphorical beer bottles start flying.
I’m not trying to deny the problems created by flame wars. I used to post comments over at PatentlyO (an excellent blog) but my point of view was so unpopular with some regulars that any post by me automatically triggered flame responses. I stopped posting there.