“Disable comments 90% of the time”

May I just break radio silence long enough to note an interesting post by Jeremy Keith, on comments and community. Don’t agree with it all - at least, not when applied to the situations I deal with - but he raises some useful points.

Should we abandon comments completely then? Absolutely not! I’m a great believer in Tim Berners Lee’s dream of read/write web. But we should think very carefully about when and where to enable comments.

[...]

I think the fundamental issue with comments is that are often enabled without reason. I wrote already about the need to justify every design decision. The same should also be true for community decisions. Does every little blog post really need to accept comments? Wouldn’t it be better to save them for special occasions?

I’d like to propose a corollary of Sturgeon’s Law for blogs: Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.

Well worth reading the whole thing.

COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS

Jetlag dissuades me from reading any more than what you’ve put here - at least for now - but why would you not want comments? Is the purpose of blogging to be like the clergy of old - six feet above contradiction?
I’ll just leave my comments enabled, thanks. Just don’t be nasty.

Chris thought this on Mar 09 06 at 11:16 pm

Very interesting reading.

A couple of thoughts immediately sprang to mind.

1)If you have comments because you believe in community, then why should you determine what is interesting, as opposed to letting the audience decide what they find they want to talk about?

2) I’m not sure the underlying - that there is a correlation between the 90% of closed posts and the 90% of crap comments - is correct. After all, does only opening a minority of posts mean that you will attract only good-quality comments? I don’t think so.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not having comments on a blog - eeee, some of us are old enough to remember the days before comments became ubiquitous - but good community management is more important (and more effective) than simply closing the loop.

bobbie thought this on Mar 10 06 at 4:17 pm

Very interesting reading.

A couple of thoughts immediately sprang to mind.

1)If you have comments because you believe in community, then why should you determine what is interesting, as opposed to letting the audience decide what they find they want to talk about?

2) I’m not sure the underlying - that there is a correlation between the 90% of closed posts and the 90% of crap comments - is correct. After all, does only opening a minority of posts mean that you will attract only good-quality comments? I don’t think so.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not having comments on a blog - eeee, some of us are old enough to remember the days before comments became ubiquitous - but good community management is more important (and more effective) than simply closing the loop.

bobbie thought this on Mar 10 06 at 4:25 pm

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