@codinghorror wrote:
There were two mitigating factors
It references a somewhat germane blog entry about community software design, but for the wrong reasons (incidental aside 3:32 into a linked video from the blog post)
There is a distinct "have you stopped beating your wife yet" aspect to the criticism in that it implies anything but extreme visible disagreement is implied endorsement of a fairly oblique and incidental aspect of the linked video.
You be the judge: did allowing this off topic aside improve or degrade the discussion? Is this discussion something you would reasonably expect / want to read -- if you were someone who listened to (most of..) the audio of the podcast this discussion is ostensibly about?
You tell me.
(also, I think it is unfair to ask readers to bear the burden of having to take action and click to suppress unwanted asides. Writers should bear that burden of being on topic plus or minus 20 percent, not the thousands to millions of readers who follow.)