The demise of blog comments
There’s been a noticeable trend in high profile blog turning off blog comments over the last few years. Is this a sign of things to come? Has blog commenting seen it’s hayday?
Back in 2007 Roger Johansson, who writes about Accessibility and Web Standards, turned off comments citing many reasons including spam and personal attacks. Web pioneer Derek Powazek recently posted about why he turned comments off, and John Gruber who writes lots about Macs and Apples, also turned off comments. Influencial web designers such as Andy Rutledge, John Hicks and Jeremy Keith have also gone comment free.
Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again - Derek Powazek
Reasons for the demise
Managing comments is hard work, especially if you get comments every day. Every comment has to be moderated, activated, the rubbish deleted, and responded to when necessary. It can soon start eating hours out of your day, and soon becomes a chore. Every hour you spend moderating comments is an hour lost to creativity.
Of course there are numerous blog tools that filter out spam, but that’s only a partial solution, since spam is only part of a bigger problem. For instance, as long as “SEO” is big business you will always get endless hoards of link marketeers taking any opportunity to pump their wares.
Part of the reason I turned off comments on this site was the endless drivel posted by SEO link builders!
Other methods
It would seem that Social Networking sites might have one answer, for instance, John Hicks is planning to use Twitter as his “commenting” system simply by adding a tweet reply link with each post. Seems like a good idea!
Further reading
http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair
http://powazek.com/posts/2463
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/the_dilemma_of_comments/
http://shawnblanc.net/2007/07/why-daring-fireball-is-comment-free/
http://www.andyrutledge.com/comments.php
http://adactio.com/journal/1331
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/
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