Rant: Un-Constructive Criticism

So I understand that one of the great things about the internet is that anyone can voice their opinion about anything. websites like Yelp help consumers find places with consistently high ratings, as written by users. The inherent problem is that you get good reviews that provide a reasonable amount of depth and you get reviews that provide nothing useful.

The same goes with comments on blogs. Recently I received the following comment on this entry:

Hello! your blog is interesting. The content is really interesting, but sorry I don’t like your website theme, maybe you find better wp themes when you search on ask for “wordpress themes base”.

so, I don’t mind people saying they don’t like my theme or content or whatever it may be (broken english or not), but this dude leaves no specifics in terms of what he doesn’t like.

Is it the color palette? the layout? the font size? the font choice? the visited vs. not visited link highlighting? the picture size relative to the blog size? is the tag-cloud offensive? does my ass look fat in the banner picture? is he offended by my sunglasses on my profile picture? does he prefer non-collapsing archive dates instead of the ones here? Maybe I have too many links? maybe the links aren’t categorized good enough? should I have the links be on the left side of the screen? what is it, man?

so some of you may contend that he did provide constructive criticism by suggesting I search for “wordpress themes base” on ask.com.

My first problem with this is, WHO THE HELL USES ASK.COM WHEN GOOGLE IS AVAILABLE??? arguably the most powerful search engine on the internet, google is my (and hopefully everyone elses’) go-to search engine.

my second problem is that if you search for “wordpress themes base”, you get hundreds of thousands of themes for wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, these package themes are really nice, but I think my site designer (and I) wanted something more unique, and decidedly not something you could just simply search for and copy. If you’re going to tell me things need to improve, tell me what specific parts you don’t like.

So I expected the commenter to have some kind of badass wordpress theme with cool coordinated colors and sweet bloggery goodness.

(cue the sad horn)

Here is a screenshot:

…. Bravo. you picked the most basic wordpress theme you possibly could. Aside from it being in german, the theme sucks. who the f*** are you to tell me I need another wordpress theme?

so the final lesson in constructive criticism. don’t comment on someone’s blog layout when yours sucks ass and looks like it was a straight up copy/paste. by making a comment on something, you are taking responsibility for it and should stand behind the message. this guy didn’t, but I’m keeping his comment up for fun and reference.

(btw, according to google, this website is about stainless steel kettles and tasting how the water is when using them)