On Sunday, Russell Beattie disabled comments on his blog. As I expected, some people are not very happy about this decision.
Gabe and I were discussing this very issue just the other day. One thing he’s noticed is that the amount of noise in MotoringFile‘s comments has been increasing faster than the size of his readership. This isn’t really surprising. At the beginning of a community, most of its members are very dedicated both to the reason they’ve formed it and in the community itself. As the group becomes popular, it starts to gain people who are not as invested in it. At some point, you start to get people who comment without bothering to read the other comments or even the original post. Eventually, the trolls and flamers appear.
I can imagine that it’s a drag for the maintainer of a community to have his passion turn into a chore. What can be done to prevent this? Obviously, some feel the best solution is to turn off commenting altogether. Others use moderation or authentication to reduce the noise.
I think it’s beneficial to keep as much of the discussion as possible in the public. At the same time, commenting as it’s implemented on blogs now is fraught with problems. It’s nearly impossible to remember everywhere you’ve left comments. Most sites don’t have a mechanism for allowing you to keep track of a conversation that you’re involved in. It’s very time-consuming to keep the amount of noise on your blog to a tolerable level. And I’m sure there’s more that I’m not thinking of.
Where is this all going? I think that commenting directly on someone else’s blog will be phased out. In its place, people will link to services that track links between blogs, such as Technorati. For example, here‘s the page on Technorati that tells you who is linking to this post on MotoringFile.
Sure, a lot of people are going to complain that this is elitist and setting the barrier for entry too high. But that’s not really true. There are plenty of free blogging services out there. Most people can figure out how to do it. Anyway, I think the blogging community would be better off if people had to invest a little of their time in order to participate.
So, kudos to Russell Beattie for being so forward-thinking.
3 Comments
I would completely agree. Unless you draft a team of moderators (similiar to a forum) large blogs simply take too much time to watch over for any one person. It’s too time consuming and in the end too frustrating. And the last point is important than it sounds. As the founder of the weblog, getting frustrated by having to work on your site is not a healthy experience and does not lead to long-lasting sites.
At some point is just comes down to comparing the revenue generated from the site and your time spent. Which of course is rather sad considering that typically is not at all why the blog was started in the first place.
I’ve actually been thinking about ending comments on my own site for some time. Though, for the opposite reason. While readership might be high, commentership (you read it here first) is rather low.
The idea of just tracking mentions with Trackbacks and Pingback and Technorati just seems better and handles the problem of remembering where you commented.
And, as you said, who reads other peoples comments anyway. Gabe, I read yours here. :) Ok, so I read other people’s comments.
Well since my rant I had the best day in years on MotoringFile today. Under ten new comments all day. I can’t explain what a relief it is to see that after being away from email for 12+ hours. And I think I managed to draft another moderator. So uh… nevermind.