we’re having the comment fight again…

While I wasn’t looking, it looks like the “Comments: good idea, or tool of Satan?” fight has broken out again. Matt Gemmell fired it off:

Comments Still Off – Matt Gemmell:

Just over a month ago, I switched comments off for this blog. I wanted to post a very brief follow-up on that decision.

 

In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move.

but a number of people with a clue have chimed in, including:

• MG Siegler
• Matthew Ingram @ GigaOM
• Fred Wilson
• Siegler (again), with a cameo appearance from Daniel Ha, a founder of Disqus
• Brent Simmons (with a reference into the emacs vs. vi religious war, now in it’s 55th year. hint: I’m a VI guy [see note 1])
• Macstories (via MG, who seems to like this argument)
• Josh Constine @ TechCrunch

That’s some heavy talent with a lot of experience in dealing with the practical realities of this issue. Who’s right?

They all are. It comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish and what you want for your own blog or publication.

I will note for the record that this discussion happened across the various blogs for the most part, and also note for the record that if it had happened in the comment section of any of the blogs except for Fred Wilson’s, it would have gotten buried and almost nobody would have seen it because comments are notorious for not ending up in RSS feeds, search engines and the like, and most rational people get to about the third troll in a busy comment area and bail out, because they have better things to do than wade into the mosh pit.

Which is my way of noting that while comment sections definitely can work (and do, if you work at them), most comment sections fail the “why am I looking at this?” test pretty quickly, Fred Wilson’s blog being a notable exception. And Youtube being a site that proves the rule beyond any need to argue, because, as usual, absent landlords end up breeding slums.

Now, I use Disqus on my blog, and Akismet, and I have almost no spam problem, because my blog is small and generally ignored by the spammers and trolls. I’m also pretty careful to vet comments and back links and don’t encourage trolls and don’t post trackback links that point to spammy sites, which I think discourages them from trying a bit. And mostly, because I’m small I don’t get lots of comments in the first place. If I got popular (hah! not likely) and started seeing high numbers of comments (I wish!) I might change my mind and go commentless without feeling guilty. I think right now, they’re a net positive to my site, but I long ago stopped seeing them as necessary, required or some kind of freaking inalienable right like some people (mostly trolls, I think) do. Heck, if I were a troll, I’d demand free places to do my trolling and insist on no adult supervision, too. I’d love to spend other people’s nickels to spread my opinions…

So my bottom line is that comments are useful, but are mostly broken. You need to put too much work into them to keep them useful — even disqus, which I think does a better job than the others I’ve looked at. But I’m not sure “nuclear” is the ultimate answer here, either.

Some suggestions:

I’d like a way to configure Disqus to turn off commenting after a period of time (like 30 days, or after 3-4 days of no comments); there is little reason to carry on a conversation after it dies down the first time, and so open comments (and trackbacks on blogs) after a couple of weeks is useful only to spammers; reduce the places they have a chance to lay their stuff by turning comments off on older material.

I’d like a way to feature good comments, give them a visibility that doesn’t exist right now. Great example: The Online Photographer, which as far as I can tell, is manually editing them into the body of the article. It’d be awesome if Disqus supported a way in the admin interface to click a checkbox “feature this” and have them appear “above the fold”, so that we can start curating the good comments into the conversation stream as a way of giving them visibility, instead of only trying to keep the noise down by moderating out the worst stuff.

But really, this is a job for a reputation engine. Disqus is well suited to implement this, and spread a reputation across all sites that use Disqus. Allow a site to define what minimum reputation is needed to display them on a site, and track the +1 and abuse flagging back to the Disqus user to generate their reputation. the trolls will sink, and a site owner can choose just where to draw a line and say “below this, you don’t get on my site”, either by not accepting comments or not displaying them. And then let a disqus user override that on an individual basis if they want. even a decent reputation setup with some minimal metrics would make it a lot easier for a site to choose whether to display or dump the trolls, and if someone does post a troll note, let the other users vote it into oblivion if they want.

I think there’s still a lot of life in comments. Fred’s blog shows the possibility, just as this discussion about comments shows how well the alternate possibility (distributing across many blogs) shows how well it can work as well. But to make the kind of environment Fred’s fostered work without the kind of fostering that someone like Fred (or Teresa Nielsen Hayden does at Making Light) we need better technology underpinnings. Most site owners/admins/moderators don’t have the “touch” to guide a community into becoming what Fred and Teresa have. Or maybe they do, but not the time or will to make it happen.

But isn’t that what all this technology is about? finding ways to enable these things and free humans from having to drudge through the grunt work? And moderating comments is drudge work. serious drudge work. With some thought and some code, we can enable the community to self police itself here. So why not do it?

(and just because I can, here are some previous rants on this topic from previous rounds of this discussion: 2008, 2003, 2011 (think comments as critiques here)

Note 1: my infamous emacs vs. VI joke: What’s the difference between an emacs user and a VI user? Give the Vi user a file and set of changes and they will sit down and edit the changes into the file and then go to lunch. Give it to an Emacs user, they’ll sit down and code a macro that they’ll use to make the changes automatically while they’re at lunch. Afterward, both of them have the changed file, but the Emacs user has a macro that he’ll file in his library of macros and never touch again in his life.

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