Turning Off Comments

I know a lot of bloggers who turn off comments. They don't want to have to police all that reader generated content. I know how they feel. I've had to delete at least 10 vulgar or hateful comments from my blog since I started blogging in late September.

But I blog because I want to stimulate thought. I want that feedback. And I get a lot of it.

In the past several days, my blog has begun to feel like a Wes Clark debate site.

Watching "Compelled to Reply" debate with "Robin" has been interesting and informative. They both have made some strong points. Nobody has been knocked out by my count yet, though. And I've learned a lot.

The same is true about wireless power. My post on that subject was borderline throw-away. I want wireless power. But I thought it was not physically possible. Well go read the comments yourself and then tell me what is possible and what is not.

My point is this. The Internet is a two way medium. That's a big deal. Don't ever forget that. Your audience aren't just your readers; they are your knowledge base, your customers, your vendors, your supporters, your antagonists, and most everything else.

So leave the comments on. And listen. And learn.

Comments

[Christina McGillycuddy]

Regarding wireless power, you should check out this Cambridge, UK company called Splash Power. (www.splashpower.com) They provide a contactless recharging solution made up of two parts: the SplashModule which is fitted to any mobile device, and the SplashPad which is a thin pad that you sit your devices on for recharging. The pad still needs to be plugged in but it is a step in the "truly" wireless power direction.

[hugh macleod]

Agreed. From an advertising persective (and let's just say for the sake of argument that a blog is partly a wee advertisement for the actual blogger) I'd say comments are essential for one being taken seriously. If a reader can see how other people react to your thoughts, it helps confirm one's own first impressions, positive or otherwise.

Human Nature: People like to know what other people think before making up their own minds. If your thoughts attract smart comments, it confirms the "Fred Wilson Brand". If you attract just moronic/vapid comments, it makes it easier for people to assume negative things about you.

Of course, there are other ways for people to get an informed opinion about you. But the comment section accelerates the process.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amen and give that man an Interactivity Is Us T-shirt! If only 10 percent of media execs got this the same way: There is no us or them anymore; it's all us.

[Elizabeth Spiers]

I'm one of the bloggers who turned my comments off because I don't have time to police them. I don't, however, think that precludes interactivity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think most of the major blogging software packages had comments until fairly recently. (I ran across Pyra in 2000 when I was still screening early stage tech deals for angel investors and I don't remember any Blogger blogs having comments at that point. But maybe I just missed them.)

Leaving aside the fact that many bloggers post their emails and IM handles, actively soliciting feedback, most blogs are inherently interactive anyway--not because most of them have comments (most of them don't), but because one of the major social conventions of blogging is referencing commentary on other sites. A recent Washington Post article that profiled TMFTML, Maud Newton, the Old Hag, and a few other bloggers insinuated that the cross-linking was incestuous and annoying, but it's basically the method through which bloggers created an interactive dialogue before comments plug-ins or built-in commenting functions existed.

IMHO, it's a higher-quality level of interaction because there's more accountability. The few times we turned comments on for Gawker, we had the classic Usenet signal-to-noise problem--a handful of useful comments buried under a lot of crap. The people who were clogging the comments board with stuff we had to monitor were, more often than not, posting anonymously using fake emails. They didn't have to be held accountable for anything they were saying, so they didn't care if they degraded the quality of content on your site. Theoretically, a pseudonymous blogger could do the same thing, but in my experience, even people who have created completely separate online identities have some interest in protecting those identities--especially if they've invested the time and effort to set up a blog and post to it regularly.

So until there's a way to make people accountable for what they write in the comments section, MT's Trackback *is* my comments section.

[simon]

HERE HERE

[scotty the body]

I agree somewhat with Elizabeth. On my site, comments aren't too much of a problem. I know who most of my tens of readers are, so they don't poop in my salad. I've noticed that many "popular" blogs disable comments, precisely because of the signal-to-noise ratio.

TrackBack seems like a positive step forward, but Ms. Spiers says it herself "MT's TrackBack." Movable Type is about the only too l that supports it well, and it's currently a bit clumsy and breaks Google something terrible. Just because it is a standard, that doesn't make it standard. Plus, one must have a weblog to participate in the discussion.

I'm working on a political/econo blog, and we are wrestling with this very issue. Politics and economics being the subjects that they are, one is certain to attract some noisy elements. One thing we are toying with is the classic registration/threaded discussion board based on weblog entry as topic thing. Although we've implemented it pretty gracefully, the usage of it is not so terribly graceful. And even though we are hoping for a bloodbath in the commentary, we don't want it to be the type of slaughter that disengages the readers, but rather engages and entertains.

These are tough issues, but I think even worse is to cut off the communicative nature of weblogs and the web in general

[hugh macleod]

Yeah, I remember when Liz turned off her comments. People were being quite rude, so I'm not surprised she did it. One of the hazards of being popular- you become a troll magnet.

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