Never read the comments

So, how's everyone been doing for the past six months?

Honestly, life in these United States has been every bit as painful as I expected, but that doesn't make it any better. It's been a series of body blows to institutions we assumed we could trust forever (I will miss the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which shut down this week), and I'm reasonably certain that we will not undo the damage in my lifetime.

It sucks, and the people who are responsible for this have earned a special place in hell. But I will not give up the fight, and I hope you won't, either.

Meanwhile, I've been continuing to help people be more productive with their Windows PCs, Macs, and mobile devices. My latest contribution to that effort is an article I published last week titled "The 10 apps I can't live or work without - on Windows, Mac, and mobile."

It's the latest installment in a series of posts I've done over the past (waves hands wildly in air) few years. I think it's a pretty good summary of how my work life has changed as the computing environment has changed. (Spoiler: More cloud, more subscriptions, less Microsoft Office.)

But what I found most fascinating were the comments from trolls who read a 3000-word article (long form, baby!) and decided to zero in one sentence. Actually, not even an entire sentence, but a parenthetical aside consisting of a short description of why I chose one of the apps on that list.

Here's what I wrote, describing how I've come to use a web app called deck.blue as my main client for Bluesky:

Before Twitter changed its name and became a vanity project for the political obsessions of the world's richest man, it was a crucial source of information and a way to build communities. It was also a firehose of information, and the only sensible way to keep track of that torrent of tweets and threads and lists was with the help of an app like TweetDeck, which became a subscribers-only feature called X Pro in 2023. [emphasis added]

There is literally nothing that should be controversial or counterfactual in that statement.

Before Twitter changed its name...

That happened, right? The service formerly known as Twitter is now X, right?

became a vanity project for the political obsessions of the world's richest man

Again, this is not controversial. The dude who bought Twitter is insanely rich, and he ordered the people who write the code on his new site to favor his posts.

Please allow me to point out that the part about Elon Musk (1) did not even mention him by name and (2) consisted of 14 words (no, not those 14 words) in a 3000-word article.

But the trolls do not like any criticism of their hero. So, these poor souls showed up in the comments to offer their critiques:

Couldn’t help yourself, eh; just had to get your political commentary shoehorned into this somewhere.

And...

Yeah, I remember that time. It was also the time when tech authors covered technology topics without injecting their own woke liberal pearl-clutching TDS bias where it has no business, making the content unbearably embarrassing for readers. Hint: free markets trump free speech. Pun intended.

One of those commenters even argued: "[F]ree markets mean we can avoid ... your employer. Why would anyone want to read your petty tirades?"

I remind you, he was in the comments section of my post, wasting his precious time in the marketplace of free ideas, when he could have been consigning me to a cornfield via the free market and avoiding all the content he doesn't like.

I do not understand these people.

Oh, wait, I do. I did enough of my own research to figure these dudes out.

They're so angry that they spend their days posting in comments sections about whatever grievance has them riled up this week.

And then, fittingly, I ran across a new post from Carl Newman of the New Pornographers (an awesome band you should know about). This part stuck with me:

I’ve been getting pretty good at navigating the internet. Avoiding the garbage, trying to find the interesting and intelligent things. If you are in ANY comment section, you have made a wrong turn. I don’t care if you’re all discussing Maya Angelou, run. Nothing good happens in the comment section.

He's almost right. But enough good happens in the comment section that I can't recommend just ignoring it. In fact, I am kind of counting on y'all to share your favorite apps and also your favorite stories about dealing with internet trolls. In the comment section. Right here.

Don't let me down.