> Then put the comment into a review queue anyway.
> What are the downsides?
Unless you're a professional moderator that is paid for your moderation... time.
The primary thing we have a finite amount of....
No blogger with a blog post of substantial views is well served by a system that requires any moderation on their part at all.
Link to a thoughtful and dedicated moderation platform and let that community decide if your thoughts are worthy of sharing and discussing.
Saves everyone time.
Here's a thought that just struck me, let me try it out:
By not having a comment section you reduce your blogs filter bubble, because without knowing how people feel about your writing your blog post simply becomes a single entry in the aggregate "wisdom of crowds", once you engage a comment section you begin to locally meta cognate on what people think of your position and you end up with less original and diverse thought for the dedicated aggregators to surface.
I just started writing a blog and I went through this thought process then. The reason I don't have comments on the blog is that I don't want to spend time moderating, and I usually access blogs from a forum like HN or reddit, where there is already a discussion. I know there is some fraction of the community that searches for blogs directly, but the main engagement I get is from reddit, so most of the audience doesn't need a comments section.
I think many people have realized that the costs (filtering & moderation) vs. benefits (community engagement) of comment sections just don't make sense for most websites.
I suspect that for comment sections to be good the users need to actually be invested in the 'forum' they're posting in. Without any skin in the game (reputation or fear of moderation) there is little incentive for most users to add value and the system becomes dominated by 'low value' posts (like trolls, flamewars, spambots, etc.).
I have to agree with him. A blog really isn't a blog without comments. A series of essays and posts arranged in chronological order, maybe, but not a blog. To me, facilitating reaction to your content and allowing two-way dialogue is one of the fundamental properties of a blog. Which means yes, either you're willing to tolerate a certain amount of crap or you have to be willing to put the hammer down and moderate.
> Does the comment section on my personal blog have to be a public place?
If the comment section on your blog started to comprise 80-90% of all the comments on the Internet? Yeah, maybe it should,
There's so much distance between your hypothetical and what YouTube, Facebook, et al are doing that it's not even a "slippery slope" argument. Maybe a "slippery Marianas Trench" argument.
> It seems those who write sparse comments want them to pop out of the screen, and those who comment more heavily like to provide a background hum of human commentary that's useful to read in certain contexts and otherwise easy to filter out.
This has slightly increased the number of comments overall and while I think quality has gone way up, I don’t want them more visible to the point of distraction.
Yep. Put me in the latter camp. If you made my comments more visable it would be highly distracting. Thinking about it like commentary is good because along with WHY comments over WHAT comments, I’ve been making an effort to describe INTENT for future readers (me).
If your incentive for commenting is to be seen by others rather than provide feedback to the author, you're exactly the kind of commenter he wasn't interested in seeing:
"I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don't. I think they're publications. And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts. If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there."
The common alternative these days is to have no comment section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there.
That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog, but with greater potential network effects, and no tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's comments.
I can't imagine not having comments on my blog. With no comments it's basically just a diary. You can track pageviews, but you never know if anyone actually read or learned anything from your post. You have no idea if anyone cares.
I have comments on my blog. I'd never consider removing them for all but the most touchy of subjects. Yes, sometimes people say things I don't agree with. Welcome to the real world.
I do moderate my comments (100% pre-moderated, because I hate captcha and yet also hate spam) but I don't get enough comments to actually make that a burden. I also don't moderate out anything that's not pure obvious spam (though to be fair, my posts don't usually cover anything terribly controversial either).
Couldn't agree with this more. Comments in my experience have been so spammed to death with bots that the benefit of a comments section is diminishing when valued in terms of time spent moderating vs. value added to the reader experience.
Social media has effectively superseded the need for comment sections in my humble opinion, providing a similar experience.
I don't want to read someone having a conversation with their community, I want to read what they themselves think without the lurking context of the subset of their audience that demands to speak up and be heard right then and there.
I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog; a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can easily become toxic and contribute to burnout. If you can read even the best comments on the best blogs and not want to just give up on humanity forever, you're a better man than I (either that, or you were one of the people writing those comments and thought they were awesome).
There's already plenty of places on the Internet for people to discuss things written elsewhere on the Internet, like right here for example. Or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or any number of other places where you have persistent communities of commenters. If it's just comments at the bottom of an article, you end up with a lot of drive-by comments that are even more dumb or pointlessly cruel or boring or strangely insistent about your potential to make $2500/day at home on your computer, just like I did! Because you totally can.
>> "I dislike the way comments are handled on Medium. Why can't they just appear at the bottom like every other site out there?"
I prefer it. If it don't want to look at them they are hidden. If I read a paragraph and am interested in what other people think I can see the comments directly referencing it. I think it also reduces stupid comments. If it looks like you a referencing something I feel like you'll make a more relevant comment.
This was my thought as well. Then I started thinking about the huge amount of moderation effort to make sure that comment sections stay civil. From where I stand it seems like for most writers offering a comment section is a lot of work for a very small payoff.
The rules you're proposing would lead to most blogs closing their comment sections entirely. People simply would not want to take the risk. This situation would not be an improvement over the status quo.
I think disabling blog comments makes sense these days. In my previous experience managing a wordpress blog, 90% of comments were garbage and the most meaningful discussions happened on platforms where discussions are a natural fit (reddit, HN, Twitter)
There's an angle I hadn't considered. The spammy and promotional type of comments would be far more likely to appear directly on the blog since that's where the value (for the commenter) is in leaving them. That's something that moderated comments would control, but you can't moderate your way out of fragmentation.
I would expect more negative comments to be left directly on the blog as well since the commenter won't have to deal with the potential backlash from their community. Which is probably also a good reason to never allow any kind of anonymous of guest comments. (Although that wouldn't stop the truly motivated negative commenters.)
> What are the downsides?
Unless you're a professional moderator that is paid for your moderation... time.
The primary thing we have a finite amount of....
No blogger with a blog post of substantial views is well served by a system that requires any moderation on their part at all.
Link to a thoughtful and dedicated moderation platform and let that community decide if your thoughts are worthy of sharing and discussing.
Saves everyone time.
Here's a thought that just struck me, let me try it out:
By not having a comment section you reduce your blogs filter bubble, because without knowing how people feel about your writing your blog post simply becomes a single entry in the aggregate "wisdom of crowds", once you engage a comment section you begin to locally meta cognate on what people think of your position and you end up with less original and diverse thought for the dedicated aggregators to surface.
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