Spam Slam, Thumbs Down

This morning, there was a notification in my inbox that I had received 4 comments on this blog last night. Unfortunately, I could tell, even from the few words that the notification included, that the comments were spam that my filter hadn’t caught.

I have to admit, since e-mail is the first thing I check right after I wake up, my mouse actually slid up towards the spam button on my e-mail before I realized what I was doing, and came to the website to label them as spam instead.

I had been thinking about writing an article on using the thumbs down button a couple days ago, but wasn’t sure what to use for an example. (Be glad the spam came along, my other idea was to use a civil liberties post I put on SU the other day, and since civil liberties is one of my soapbox issues, this post probably would have gotten a bit sidetracked).

But back to the spam. When I use the spam button on my e-mail, I’m telling the e-mail program not to let any more e-mail in from that specific source. But, if it’s not the source that’s the problem, like this morning, then I’ll be blocking an address that does send helpful e-mails, even though these weren’t especially helpful (okay, that’s not quite the truth either…they did help me know to go delete the spam from my blog).

Using the thumbs down is like hitting the spam button. If the page I’m on is spam, then I’ll thumb it down because I definitely don’t want to get any more pages like that. On the other hand, if it’s an article that I disagree with, but part of a topic that I’m interested in or a blog that I like, I don’t want to tell SU not to send me anything more from there. So in this case, it’s best to either not thumb the page at all, or thumb it up, but write a review stating my opinion of the article.