Meta stuff.

I think there's a fundamental problem with using a /.-style presentation for discussion. Basically, it gives a completely illegitimate bias towards whoever says things first. Everyone reads the article. Most people read the responses made in the first few hours. After that, you'll get read by a few diehards and that's about it --- the only way people are going to even know that there's been a response is to specifically note that the `x replies' was `x-1 replies' yesterday. Ugh.

Advogato's diaries get around this problem: no diary entry is particularly more likely to be read than any other; and when it is more likely, well, that's only because one person is generally more interesting than another. That's not too unfair. Unfortunately, it makes it hard to follow cross diary discussion, and if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.

Something that might be interesting, hypothetically, might be a way of threading individual diary entires that are on similar topics, and a way of promoting a thread of diary entries to an article, after the fact. Or, maybe not.

Oh, and insert random support for what jennv and dan had to say about the ``You're a woman, so you wouldn't understand'' flamewar, or whatever it was trying to be. I mean, yeesh.

Oh, and while I'm on meta stuff, I think GalaxyQuest would've been better grounds for analogy than R and J. I mean, can't you just see it? The heroic BSD software engineer falling for a cute Linux chick who then grows purple tentacles, while another BSDer in the background says "Oh, that's just not right." in a worried tone as they embrace. Doesn't it just fit?