[_delirium]

Maybe it's relative to what other audiences you also encounter, but I haven't found things too bad in the programming blogosphere. Sure, there are jerks, but there are jerks everywhere. My day-job is in academia, and there are a lot of jerks at academic conferences. You're more likely to get someone furious that you're intruding on their area, or critical that you aren't using their preferred methodology or citing their papers, than you are to get someone genuinely interested in understanding what you're doing and why. I actually sometimes find the tech-blog reception friendlier, on the occasions I've ventured some of my academic work online.

Admittedly, it might be worse if I were a celebrity blogger with tons of readers; when only relatively few people read you, generally it's only people who have some reason to like your work that would bother commenting.

[JoeAltmaier]

This YC thread actually has a lot in common with those nasty programmer-readers. Look at all the personal insults, broad generalizations etc. I guess programmer-readers are everywhere.