Comments on: Regarding blog comments, again

By: Laura D'Amico

Laura D'Amico — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:35:04 +0000

Great, thoughtful post, Colin.

I agree with you that it comes down to scale, mostly. If you have a huge site, you can turn off comments and know that those who care will post and link back. And those who don’t, well their opinion wasn’t worth reading in the first place.

But for smaller sites, comments allow the readers to interact, something they likely wouldn’t do once they navigate away from the page.

By: howard hall

howard hall — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:23:58 +0000

I’m with Chris and you, Colin. As the proprietor of a less well-traveled site, I hardly have cause to hide from the trolls.

That said, I also know how many comment-worthy items I come across. Even if I intended to blog about them (or tweet, for that matter), I’d get sidetracked before I got my next chance. Commenting is so much easier, at least when I have the time to add something non-trollish

By: chris runoff

chris runoff — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:48:36 +0000

“I suppose my main reason for agreeing to disagree with Jeremy was because, well, my site isnâ€™t that popular.”

This line sums it up for me. Turning off comments to force the conversation to be perpetuated blog-to-blog presupposes that you already have a large enough amount of traffic to support that.

For blogs with smaller amounts of traffic, turning off comments would be cutting off the most immediate tool for continuing the conversation.

By: E. Christopher Clark

E. Christopher Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:13:24 +0000

Everyone should, and slowly but surely they are. So, maybe it’ll eventually be an option. But, for my site, where we still have a lot of late-adopters (technology-wise), it’s going to take some time, I think.

By: Colin Devroe

Colin Devroe — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:12:34 +0000

Dan: Regarding your comment about Twitter replies and blog comments not being "connected". Check out these posts on how to do it. There is always a way.

By: Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:05:41 +0000

The irony of commenting on this post makes me giggle. That said, I’ve been toying with the idea of leaving comments off by default for the next version of Superfluous Banter â€” there have been so many great comments over the years that I couldn’t bring myself to remove them from the design entirely, but by switching the default to “off” it will allow me to decide if the conversation regarding a particular topic would be better suited to the comments rather than other blogs.

In general, Twitter is a much better environment for the kind of short-form discussion that typically occurs in blog comments, and although it isn’t directly/permanently connected to the post in the same way as comments, neither are opinions posted on other blogs…

By: Colin Devroe

Colin Devroe — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:55:05 +0000

That is true. I bet if you brought that up to Alex he’d say “Well, everyone SHOULD have Twitter, right?”

By: E. Christopher Clark

E. Christopher Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:46:35 +0000

Good post, Colin. The one issue I see with leaving comments off and asking people to comment via their blogs instead is that you are then limiting yourself to receiving comments from only those people who actually have blogs.