Comments on Comments
1. Comments are just another part of a blog. Ultimately they are part of the expression in design for any blogger to customize his or her own space. So it’s fine to not have the ability for readers to post comments. It’s also fine to have capcha, or not, or require a user login, or what have you. The important thing is to realize the consequences of these decisions. Same applies to trackbacks and pingbacks.
2. While I have no empirical data, the anecdotes I have, I feel, should be well received. You probably would agree with me, in other words, as to what motivate people to leave comments. They are well laid-out elsewhere anyways, thanks Chris.
- Effort. Not everyone leaving a comment cares for blogging. One way to think of it is to think of them as contributing authors who writes one short post per every long post the blogger writes that interests them. I hope I don’t have to belabor this point. Even a bare-minimum reply/comment blog requires multitudes more effort. For someone who doesn’t believe in web 2.0 magic, he needs to understand at least the idea that time and money > meta comments. Chris points this out in a different way but this is the underlying idea. Lowering that barrier allows more information exchange, if you’d like that.
- Email is fail. While it is a veritable part of the internet, a growing generation of users rely on it less and less. In fact, to me it is one of the last resort for internet communication in some contexts. Being the most direct parallel to snail-mail letter (how often do we send those?), to me email smacks of formal communication, effort (see above), and some level of professionalism. I use it extensively at work, like many white-collar labor do, but things like Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, Youtube, forums on the web, blogs etc…that’s how people roll nowadays. We are a people who email less and less. It isn’t to say email doesn’t have its place, but it infers a different social context that may encourage or discourage certain kind of communication. It’s a filter to expression, and you have to be aware of its effect on your audience if you force them to communicate that way with you. Plus there’s also the issue that I personally dislike–public posting private communication. It isn’t to say you shouldn’t or you should, but I prefer to not having an expectation that email is non-private foisted against the illusion that it is private. It might be healthy to think of email that way, but email is still a private medium. It’s just not confidential.
- Community versus content. Smart social networking concepts focus on people and not on the platform. On the other hand, process-oriented thinkers (Author is as stellar of an example as any) probably don’t stress along these lines. While the idea that comments inflate a blogger’s ego is not off the mark, it isn’t the whole story in regards to ego padding. The comments, ultimately, satisfy the needs of some of a blog’s readers. There are many reasons why. People like attention (”first comment!”), it can be fun (”first comment!”), and it is one way to socialize (”hahah I got first comment!”) between one blog’s own readership. And ultimately, in a social setting, it is your relationships that floats your ego as well as the objective metrics (page views, ad revenue, comment counts, etc). For example, I don’t know, I think I prefer 100 comments talking about what I actually wrote in my post rather than 100 comments saying “ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH.” Not that there’s anything wrong with a fun and unobstructive meme. And both are better than seeing 100% of your comments reflecting disdain from your readers. In other words, comments help build readership and community, and not just in terms of stroking egos. Or it is all about the ego, but one needs to realize there are more than one way to stroke it.
- Discourse is dumb. Leave aside the Daily Kos, which I suspect Author think little of as far as free discourse, the important takeaway is to realize that discourse varies. And different people have different ideas as to what they like to read on a site. 99% of the blog posts on the aniblog scene are, frankly, not exactly intellectual material. [Those who produce such works are prone to taking hiatus after a short stint.] While I personally believe content is still the king of driving readers, most people aren’t actively looking for enlightenment. Actually, my real point here is that people who talk shop will talk to other people who talk the same shop as a natural tendency. The Daily Kos has a fairly clear political bias and agenda and it’s kind of duh to act like a social conservative in a sea of leftists. Discourse is artificial yet organic like that. Who cares about free speech if no one feels like talking? Let your readers help you by giving you feedback, and imbedded comments are obviously the #1 way to do so. Chris’s comments over yonder summarizes this point concisely as the #1 intended reader of most comments are the blogger him/herself.
3. I am aware that Author’s bones are primarily with the notion of “discussion” or as I read it, comments being some way to embellish and draw useful discourse. Silly Gia (but she knows how to have fun)! But anyways, it is actually the right take. Serious discourse on a topic lends itself to chain blogging, much like what I’m writing here is really commenting on Author’s chip on his shoulder. This is an automatic, natural response, folks. There are a lot of advantages to replying in such a format. From redundancy (don’t put all your good posts in the same basket) to volume to having a better grasp and context to build your reply to simply more of your own editorial control… But people know this, and we do it.
4. Speaking of editorial control, who gives a damn? This is the internet. The paradigm has always been that the reader is empowered and not the editor. If you don’t want to read something, you don’t have to read it. The problem only arises when you do because you are tricked or forced, such as a bad comment in a sea of good comments, or trying to find a good link in a list of bad links, or something like that. That’s when editorial control is helpful. It really should be used to dictate signal-to-noise-ratio and not to shape discourse, even if the two ideas overlap. That’s just my preference anyways. Some people are much more hammed about it, although I think my way gives the best bang for the buck–editing takes effort after all.
5. But the flip side is also true–you want to focus the signal, if that’s what you’re after. Comments (as blogs) that are dispersed across too many blogs increase chances of the readers missing out on good content. (It’s important to distinguish that from the blogger missing out on good content.) How you weight that risk is up to you, but one thing for sure is that I have no editorial control over other people’s blogs. Wouldn’t it be shrewd of me (and any blogger who wants to actually have real discourse) to try aggregate them? And what’s more effortless than just have people make comments on your blog directly? Balanced with the effort it takes to edit out the noise, there is some kind of happy medium where the right kinds of talks are recorded as blog comments and other, right kinds of talks are in different people’s blogs, in the right amount. I think?
Why do I suddenly want to build a RAID farm?
Weighting the positives and negatives, I hope it’s clear why most serious blogs allow for comments. It’s just that these factors do not apply to every blog or every blogger so I don’t see the problem either way as long as they thought it through. People will write blog posts about things that they think are worth writing about, so allowing for comments, at the least, doesn’t work against what Author is really championing for. Do whatever.
I never used to pay much attention to comments on my blog, but eventually decided that replying to them was an act of courtesy and helped the whole community spirit thing. Disabling comments? I honestly don’t know why any right-minded person would bother. Harsh I know, but the peculiar train of thought that got me there runs like this:
Comments, at least for me, are either corrections, clarifications or elaborations on the post itself, or they are requests for corrections, clarifications or elaborations. If someone goes to the trouble of commenting they are making a publicly-viewable attempt to tell the writer, and everyone else, something about the post.
Disabling comments implies, again I’m speaking for my own personal views here, that nothing further can be added. What is written is unequivocal, 100% correct and absolute. It’s an act on the writer’s part of drawing a line under the article and prevents anyone disagreeing with, or adding to, the topic at hand. This strikes me as ignorant and arrogant, unless the article is so trivial and throwaway that there’s nothing worth adding (but even then, Twitter tweets can be replied to). Comments are healthy for discussion, whether it’s intellectual discourse or a short “I agree/disagree” to the lighter and less serious articles.
I’m sure there are security reasons for disabling commenting but TBH the effort of maintaining a decent anti-spam plugin is no big deal at all. If all I got in comments was abuse I’d take a long, hard look at the content I’m writing first, before jumping to any other conclusions.
I find that the complaints about comments only tends to happen with blogs that profess strong viewpoints on matters that tend to touch a nerve in some way for the readers, and is done so in a way that doesn’t allow for the quick refutation the reader wants to give. I mean, no-one is bugging Evirus about doing this, are they? Though that is a too generalized opinion, I guess.
I guess taking off comments helps by focusing responses into “better pieces” of work on blogs (or commenting on other blogs! :D). And it can at least get people talking about you, whether that’s good or bad (it tends to be bad in the cases I see, and I won’t lie in saying that I’ve done some of that myself), but it does develop some sort of community/greater recognition/notoriety outside of the blog, as compared to “keeping it inside” there. But a happy medium can be arranged with moderation and it all depends on what type of dialogue(s) you favor, I guess. :P
But personally I do get a lot of ideas to blog from comments I see or write more often than in blog posts (probably because there’s more noise to possibly get signals from?). It does matter differently for each person.
And it also boils down to whether or not you read it, but that response can sound like teasing with how I interpret it sometimes, especially the way some bloggers phrase it. (”You don’t have to read it” –> “I’m not writing for you” –> “I don’t care what you think”). Hey, I can be a selfish bastard in reading it, but I guess I don’t expect bloggers to sound like they are ones too (even when they aren’t)?
“Disabling comments implies, again I’m speaking for my own personal views here, that nothing further can be added. What is written is unequivocal, 100% correct and absolute. It’s an act on the writer’s part of drawing a line under the article and prevents anyone disagreeing with, or adding to, the topic at hand.”
I absolutely agree with this viewpoint. There’s few things more irritating as a blog reader than wanting to offer some words of agreement or a tidbit of information and not having an easy, accessible means by which to do so.
It is very much closing the door on opportunities for the development of emergent community through sharing of thoughts and ideas, and almost seems to fly in the face of what blogging (or at least my conception of blogging) is about in many ways. It generates sort of an unspoken feeling that the site is “author-centric” as opposed to “reader-centric”.
No pun intended, I swear.
THIRD!!!
Email has its place in one-to-one conversations in which large amounts of info have to be dumped, but I like blog comments better because it allows more readers to participate in the conversation at the same time.
I believe Martin is correct. To me, having comments disabled is a discourtesy — the blogger is telling me that I can’t possibly have anything interesting to say about his topic. This may, indeed be true, but it also leads me to reciprocate and begin to doubt that the blogger has anything interesting to say.
I am of two minds on the claim “serious discourse on a subject lends itself to chain blogging”. It only does so if Ani-Nouto chooses to point his readers to the chain, for example (which, again in this case, I note that he has done so). It’s nice to have the discussion in one place, instead of linked by a tenuous thread of suggestive blog-post headlines. On the other hand, if the topic isn’t kept alive by subsequent blog posts, it gets lost in flood of new bloggery (who goes back and looks at blog posts from a week ago? Probably only the original participants in a discussion.
So I suspect there is a balance to be had between the two extremes — some discussion can be had in comments (as is happening here, and as I think often happened on Jeff Lawson’s anime blog), and some discussion can spin out among blogs.
“Speaking of editorial control…” One has to remember that there’s a difference between “editorial control” and “censorship”. The former limits what one can say in a particular forum, the latter limits what one can say. Acts of editorial judgment are sometimes accused of being censorship, when they are often the opposite — helping the reader weed out “a bad comment in a sea of good comments, or trying to find a good link in a list of bad links”.
PS, where does the opening image come from? It looks very familiar.
You tempted me into posting “ROW ROW FIGHT DA POWAH.”
If you ask me, I like comments because I know that there is a limit to how objective/right I can be when talking about something. Comments are like an extra pair of eyes or ears to me.
Hey, I’m a girl– I think I’m obligated by law to just wanna have fun, or something. ;)
That said, while I can understand a moonlighting programmer not wanting to go to the effort of creating their own comment system from scratch, disabling a comment system that’s already built into one’s site is almost a declaration that the feedback on it isn’t worthwhile. Even if you’re disabling because you got “flamed,” you’re still saying that the pain/hassle of those flames outweighs anything your readers have to say to you. Which is kind of insulting to your readers, unless you’re getting nothing but a dozen flame spams an hour or something!
Personally, I depend heavily on user comments– especially for corrections! A lot of my users read Japanese considerably better than I do. And of course, I’m human and I don’t always know everything I think I know, or I miss out on something, or just plain make an error (like on my winter preview, I accidentally cited the name of a Series Director on one show instead of the overall Director, and my users pointed it out to me).
On top of that…even in the short life of Anime Vice we’ve had some interesting discussions in comments, from speculations on Bandai’s announcement to a massive group shriek at the thought of Keanu playing Spike (*shudder*) to lengthy discourse on fansubs, piracy, etc.
Even if someone starts going to all the effort of flaming me a couple of timeson every post, I wouldn’t even consider taking away comments– they simply have too much overall value, both in terms of entertainment and idea.
ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH.
Well, I love comments. Even ones like that. For various reasons. But I think what is more important for Author is for him to explain where he’s coming from rather than why he thinks one way or another about comments. Kind of like why Linux is not n00b friendly and it could care less.
dm: the image is copied from the new Eureka 7 movie home page.
This is an interesting entry Omo… as a anime blogger myself - often I appreciate if people would write comments.. and it is correct that if there is a comment, then it can be better than writing into a void.
Still there was that one time I wrote something, in one of my other blogs and was then criticized for having bad writing. That was kinda hurtful, but I still respond to it as I can, then some… Good comment from Gia, about commenting for the sake of editing… since blogging is such a rapid paced thing.
From what I remember from one of the blog panels I attended in a professional setting. Leaving comments, is a polite way for the author to acknowledge that what they what they write about has a steady readership.
Right, gia, but you have to generate profit with your site–of course you need to enable comments. You need to keep your readership, establish some notoriety, increase SEO score, et cetera. But Author doesn’t need to do that. To me, disabling comments (on all posts) is to shift the focus away from the reader to the blog’s author. Who says blogs *should* be “reader-centric”? The medium shouldn’t define what you have to say. Maybe it’s low self-esteem on my part, but I seriously believe that if you want your site to be driven by the quality of its content, then disabling comments is pretty much the only way to prove that to your readership. I’d think Author’s readership is strong, and I guess that expresses something a whole lot of you are trying to deny.
I think the fact that Author’s readers want to express something that is best fitted for blog comments is reason enough to complain about the lack there of, regardless of what his readership wants to express?
And that said…
Author’s site is more a meta commentary/note, as it is appropriately titled. I think it’s a useful read because he does highlight sites and posts that which I subsequently go read that I would not have otherwise found.
But I do not think Miha’s point is why he disabled comments. It’s more because the nature of the site is better off with its readers commenting about the comments Author made via other blogs or twitter or email or whatever. It gets a little silly when people want to comment on comments on a comments blog?
There’s also a dangerous precedent here.
It implies that the guy does not like being accountable.
I mean, if you read the stuff he puts out, I’m not surprised that he wants comments CLOSED.
They’re not controversial for controversy’s sake, it’s the fact that HE DOES NOT CARE WHETHER THEY’RE CONTROVERSIAL OR NOT. He may claim truth for truth’s sake, but in reality he’s just an ass who does not like being accountable towards others.
That’s one reason you close comments. And quite frankly, he has the freedom to care less what his readers think.
But if you’re really out to troll people you’d let the comments run. It’s just way more effective. A real pundit does that. In some sense because comments are closed, you know they’re not really trying to troll you. They’re just honest-to-goodness socially inept.