Greg Lexiphanic

Are blog comments dead?

In June there was a short-lived hub-bub directed at John Gruber about whether blogs should allow comments. Gruber believes that his site is fine without comments. I tend to agree but not for the same reasons.

Gruber’s argument centres around how the comments on popular blogs tend to be mostly drivel and that, by not having comments, he can “curate” the “conversation”. Indeed, his main opponent at the time does have a point when he points out that Gruber’s blog, by not having a comments feature, requires people to post their thoughts elsewhere, increasing the number of inbound links back to Gruber’s site. But that’s hardly a Bad Thingâ„¢.

I think the main reason that the comments on popular blogs are of such a poor quality is that the people making them are not held accountable to them. Joel Spolsky points this out himself with an example of an innocent real estate blog that descended quickly into a shouting match about the middle east (unfortunately, the article in question has since had its comments deleted). This occurred because there’s no accountability in the comments. A user can create an account and start commenting under a random username and no one will be able to identify who they are. I could argue about the benefits and drawbacks of online anonymity for several more paragraphs. I think a lack of accountability online is appropriate for certain parts of the Internet (e.g. 4chan thrives because of it).

Accountability is the solution. With accountability you can ensure that comments are of a reasonable standard with at least some thought put behind them. But how do you ensure that? Who are they accountable to?

Commenters may not be accountable to a site owner but they are accountable to their friends and followers. If they leave a comment on a website under an anonymous username, they are accountable to no one. But, if that same comment appears on their Twitter profile, in their Friendfeed, on their blog, or somewhere else that their friends and followers might visit, the author of the comment is now accountable. This doesn’t solve the problem of spam, but I do believe it helps to prevent the greater internet fuckwaddery that is so prevalent, and that Gruber (and many others) are seeking to avoid.

Additionally, there is a good chance we will see the conversation spread from here. I talk about things with people on Twitter and yet I feel it a shame that the original author might not get to see that stream of conversation which they originally seeded. This would contribute towards that.

To answer the question in this entry’s title, I think that blog comments as the implementation we understand them now to be are dying, yes. But, the concept of commenting on a blog has not. It’s just that we want to start sharing this conversation with people we know instead of just the “community of commenters” that forms around a particular blog. We want to have these conversations in the virtual places we have all of our other conversations.

Blog commenting, therefore, needs to evolve.

The issue, then, is in implementation. How can this be made to work?

I will use my blog as the platform for this experiment but I encourage you to attempt implementations yourself.

I have switched off the built-in WordPress comments system and, instead, encourage you to talk about this and any other blog posts on the other communications platforms that you might use: Twitter, Friendfeed, Google Buzz and Facebook. The BackType Connect system will handle the rest by making your discussion appear below.

I anticipate that, in this discussion, we will find some problems that crop up along the way, and I will discuss them further with you both online and, where it is justified, on this blog. You are also encouraged to blog or comment about it yourself wherever you might choose to do so – on your Posterous blog or Tumblr or somewhere else.

Between us all, we can find a method that will work to let us share in the conversation wherever it might happen online and still collate it at the conversation’s source.

So, what do you think? Do you think this might work? Or do you think the existing commenting systems are fine?

• 11 July 2010