If I look at posts like this one[1] and this one also[2] - these are extremely detailed articles (very interesting too), but no comments? I am not pointing my finger towards the authors, either.
It's just weird that commenting is being pushed either to Twitter or email.
What do you think about this?
I fully understand that blog comments can be a pain in the butt to moderate when the average Joe just starts leaving "Thanks!" with a link to their website. But, it's perfectly normal to remove the ability for anyone to link back to their website.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149
[1]: https://wattenberger.com/blog/css-cascade
[2]: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit...
I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add.
Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the comments were still valuable, but moderating felt like an additional stress, on top of writing.
After a few of my blog posts made it on to Hacker News, I noticed the discussions here are far more interesting and productive, surpassing the best comment threads on my blog over the 8 years while I still had comments open.
I removed all commenting and never looked back. When I write, I focus on writing. If anyone wants to, they can find my contact details to share insights about the post - and some people still do.
As someone writing a blog, I'm much better off with no comments open to the whole world. I suspect this is what most other people have also realized.
I’ve come to the conclusion that adding one more discussion outlet won’t concentrate the discussion in one place. Even when said outlet sits right next to the posts themselves and is ‘canonical’, that’s just not going to happen. On the contrary, it will just contribute to the dispersion of discussion.
Besides, having comments under an article means that the article stops being a document and starts being an application [0], and that’s something I’d like to avoid. So, no comments on my blog.
But I do plan to link to HN threads so it’s easier to find discussion where it happens. I just don’t see value in it happening next to the articles themselves.
[0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
Which says firstly something about the quality of the discourse that can occur within the comments section and the tone of these comments.
Comments have also devolved into a collection of memes and one-liners that don't add anything to the discussion in the best case scenario. At worst, they lead to my previous point. As gregdoesit said in the top comment, a lot of comments have evolved into straight up spam and, similarly, on my blog, I added my contact email address if someone wants to follow up or inquire about anything I post there.
So I think that the participatory internet is dead to some extent. I never got this "comment on a news article" thing either. If a bomb goes off and tragically kills 5 people your "thoughts and prayers + praying-emoji" doesn't add anything. Commenting "fake news" also doesn't add anything. A team losing a game 2-0 or 38-0 also doesn't need a comment section "no, they didn't!".
What I think I'm trying to say is that there is little to be gained, it ads additional maintenance overhead and it can also become toxic very quickly. An older page I had use to provide comments but most of my time was deleting the 10-15 comments posted every day by bots.
Also, the irony of me posting a comment about being anti-comment isn't lost on me.
And there's the hypersensitivity these days. I'm a boring blogger that writes about dry highly niche technical subjects. None that stir the pot. The least divisive topics one can imagine. And still I got burned. One of my pieces got a fair amount of reads and from referrals I could see quite a few came from Twitter, which I normally avoid like the plague.
Checking the sources there, I was in disbelief. I'm not going to be repeating the exact fragment, but imagine writing on your blog something like this:
"So to operate this control, you use your keyboard to..."
And on Twitter somebody behind your back goes:
"Keyboard!??! What fucking ableist douchebag is this idiot guy"?
And their (luckily) small bubble clapped in agreement of what a dark character I am. We all know it's typical of Twitter, but I always figured it happens to other people, not to boring me. I guess the bar really is that low now, and writing anything at all has become a liability. Even more so if you consider that future bad faith interpretations are likely to be even more extreme, so they'll be digging up your stuff with a passion.
I guess I got lucky. Had my sin be slightly larger, they'd likely be calling my employer for my termination.
Which begs the question, with this type of hostility, why write at all?
For our clients, it was almost always turning into a political discussion. Even on posts talking about something as innocuous as an event that was held for the company's employees, people would turn up and start talking about something political and it would eventually devolve into threats and dox attempts. It just wasn't worth the moderation effort anymore.
Spam can be blocked automatically by tools fairly easy but actual conversations unrelated to the topic at hand required too much work. And in one case, threats led to police involvement and that was more than the client was willing to deal with.
Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior.
If you have something substantive to say, respond in a blog post of your own.
If you have something personal to say, send an email. This is scary and intimate, but also permits you to actually talk to a person without the performative aspect of doing it in public.
This is solved either by moving commenting entirely off-site to a larger network, or by using identities from a larger scope.
Upon further reflection, it's also about sense of community, or lack thereof - on social networks, I know who's reading my comments and I can engage with them. On blogs... I have no idea who else is reading it, I may never come back to see any responses, I may not care about anybody else's comments without context to put them in, so neither the incentive nor feedback loop are there for me.
(I may comment on e.g. Rock Paper Shotgun, but I don't consider it a blog - it's an online magazine and it has both the sense of community and daily return value. )
Should we be sad that discussion about a piece doesn't occur centrally, or is it actually better that several discussions occur - each of them with their hosting venue's specific tone ? As someone else mentioned, webmentions might bring the best of both worlds.
It's also a nice moral boost for the team on occasion! https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1...
We have pretty easy tools to remove spam accounts and spam comments, it's rarely an issue. I feel like because it's a custom implementation we're off a lot of radars, and we make the process of registering to being able to post comments laborious enough to stop most of it (honeypots, verified emails, etc)
My whole reason for doing it is a two way interaction. I think not enough people can just talk these days though, they get angry and mean about the silliest stuff. That leads to thinner skinned people just not willing to actually listen to anyone else, which is a shame. The most hate I ever got was a post about Go binary sizes of all things - literal personal attacks. Like I just wanted to have a conversation about compilers and people were insulting my mental abilities.
So basically on the one hand can understand why people would not have comments, but on the other hand I have no idea why you would blog at all without them aside from ego.
I have worked with bloggers and news sites over the last 2 years, and are some things I have learned:
* Comments give a better sense of the your audience. Take Youtube for example. When you see comments in a video, you know what kind of audience that channel has, and what the audience like. Same for blogs. * Comments give new visitors an idea how good/bad your blog post is. For example, take a programming tutorial. When there are comments about the article, you can make a better decision whether you should use the code examples in your application. Don't forget that stackoverflow is built on user comments. People are not going to search the article you shared on Twitter to find out comments. (If you only share on Twitter/HN, make sure to link the Twitter/HN discussion at the bottom, like Cloudflare blog does) * Comments let you build your own audience, which you own. Just think, what happens when Twitter bans you?
However,
* When new bloggers do not get comments from their audience, they become discouraged. I have seen people really excited about starting their new blog and adding our commenting system, and they just say after a few weeks, they just remove comments from their blog because they don't get comments. The fact is that getting comments on your blog is harder than getting a comment on social media. The obvious reason is that the user has to "signup".
Okay, so what if make commenting easier? For example, just with username. So, we make commenting public. It works fine until you are flooded with spam comments. Tools like Akismet do a good job on detecting spam. The real problem comes when people start to publish non-spam but not-so-good comments on your blog. This is when you need moderating... manual moderating. It requires time.
Finally, to answer your question: Are blog comments a thing of the past? It is a decision of the blogger. Some like to have public discussions, but some like to have it in Twitter DMs or emails. Some don't care about moderating but some do. From my experience, most news sites I worked with REALLY care about their commenting section, and they invest a lot in software and moderation teams to have nice, engaging conversations on their websites.
Or local archaeology. Again, not general interest.
Or an artist and his/her work. Again not general interest.
But in all these scenarios there is benefit in it not being yet another Facebook group and having comments open for that specific community.
For spam there is good old recapthca and then the check to see if it is Eric Jones.
Some people are not popular and don't get a torrent of comments to filter.
It all depends on what you are doing.
With software you can't expect useful comments. Stack Overflow have got people covered. But with something like model steam engines where there is geographical scope and a particular demographic, comments make sense.
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/ [2]: https://giscus.app/
Even just having an endpoint to submit comments seems a lot to ask when the site otherwise doesn't even need a database.
Ultimately I think the need/want for discussion is better served by different websites rather than asking every site to provide comments. It would be nice if browsers could integrate or at least link those comments for you.
To me, blogging without comments would feel like being that guy at a party who drones on endlessly about his own pet obsession, oblivious to the fact that his "listeners" are bored or want to add something.
1) They were difficult to manage. You never know when someone is going to spam you or take a swipe at you. And if a post goes viral, you’re basically inviting both of those things.
2) Disqus, the primary comment system I used, had advertising that you had to pay for to remove, and I was going in a different direction with my ad strategy at the time. (Also, even if I was OK with running ads like that, they were no longer worth the price of admission. There was a time back when I ran my old site, ShortFormBlog, where Disqus ads brought in a couple of hundred bucks a month. No longer.)
3) There are many other venues for people to offer their take on a piece; why limit them?
I think Boing Boing’s approach of replacing comments with a forum struck a good balance.
There's lot of hate, spam and other abuse, one word replies or no replies at all.
Is that worth running the "infrastructure", checking comments, moderating them? I don't think so, I don't miss comments in blogs.
Otherwise, you just have a lot of ongoing maintenance. Older posts look really old with a few early comments, and then gaps. If you want to rewrite part of a post, you’re sort of stuck with those parts referenced by comments.
If it’s so tricky, and your blog is a hobby/side project, it’s just logical to have blogs on the site you control, and discussion in the wild where network effects can boost it. Then leave open channels for people to contact you personally, if you want further engagement.
The medium seems to have settled into these features for your average blogger.
I guess people are getting the same kinds of feedback through Twitter now but it feels so much more... I dunno, inauthentic?
A recent shocker was someone (or a spambot) posting links to supposed child porn on my site. Don't worry, I didn't bother to click it...
I haven't yet shut down my comment section, but I set it such that I must approve all new comments. Needless to say, I have a backlog of 600+ comments to approve, and 99% of them are spam so I just don't bother
On the few blogs I've visited in the last few years that have comments, there seems to be another problem - groupthink. Such blogs tend to attract very devoted regulars, who often converge on a very particular set of opinions on the blog's topics. Sure, they have their internal disagreements and conflicts, just like the mean girls in Heathers, but that's nothing compared to the way they'll gang up and harass anyone who doesn't kowtow to the clique as a whole. Even when it's a not-quite-regular (i.e. repeat visitor over a long period) in generally good standing, disagreeing on a fairly minor point, they'll get absolutely hammered into silence or departure. Sometimes it's not deliberate or coordinated, just people who all like to have their own say and don't stop to consider whether the not-so-nice thing they're about to say has already been said by ten others. Other times it seems more like a peer-pressure thing, scoring points (or even competing) with each other by each trying to take their best shot at the Target Of The Day. This consolidation tends to compound over time, too, so the oldest blogs tend to be the worst afflicted.
Either way, it turns the comment section into an exclusive social club, and precludes any substantive discussion. I can think of several blogs where I've seen this play out, and not one where real discussion has continued over the long term. So yes, maybe there are some exceptions somewhere, but at a first approximation blog comments are (and certainly should be) a thing of the past.
There seems to be a relatively simple solution - require a proof-of-work puzzle to be solved before the server will accept your comment submission. Then put the comment into a review queue anyway.
Valid users submit comments very infrequently compared to an automated bot. They won't be inconvenienced if you set the difficulty right, and their environmental impact and electricity costs will be negligible.
Bots will be attempting to submit spam comments en-masse, and so will need to be spending a large amount of money on electricity for solving these problems. The expected value per problem they solve will be extremely low, and so they'll actually be losing money due to electricity costs - and as for environmental impact, they could have been burning that CPU to mine bitcoin or something anyway (and, after they notice the servers they run their bots on start getting pegged on CPU, they'll quickly add your site to a blacklist).
This solution also has the benefit of not feeding Google's ML efforts like Recaptcha would, or requiring you to set up Cloudflare, or inconvenience your users.
What are the downsides?
I do sympathise with writers who don't want to deal with moderating it, working out how to manage them is a problem, but finding the one of dozens of spaces people are talking about the thing written is also challenging.
I mean, my own blog doesn't have comments.
Twitter et al don't really solve this I find because you really can't find the different threads of discussion that are occurring after the fact. It's really not helpful when you're trying to understand what was being said at the time on those kinds of platforms. I don't want to have to be an archaeologist to work out what was being said at the time about a topic.
One recent trend which I do like is authors explicitly calling out spaces to respond to their work, via a link. I see this a lot with HN and reddit threads being called out by the author and it's really nice reading the follow on thoughts of people who've engaged with the writing, perhaps years later from when the initial article was written.
But I do think we need a better solution to this.
That way you get the moderation of the fediverse, an account on some AP instance is required, but you can still display the comments on your website with embedded JS.
It didn't get much better with Blogger either. Now much of the time I see Facebook Comments embedded, or something like Disqus. Comment horror stories didn't help Digg much, if I recall correctly.
bots, spam, and uncontrollable political nonsense took most of them out. I don't think it's too weird. It takes a lot of the stress off of the blog owners, and to some extent, the responsibility.
Blogs weren't alone either.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/what-happened-after-7-news...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com
Are some examples.
Disclaimer: I work at Substack.
1. low utilization among real readers
2. high abuse by spammers
3. the few hold out site that keep comments on articles are politicized garbage of very little real value and make me wonder why I continue to visit their site at all, e.g. slashdot
I have a "strictly technical" SWE blog with approximately 4k to 8k users per month, which I have been maintaining it for 3/4 years.
I use Disqus for comments. I virtually have no spam (if I had some, it's been so little that I don't remember it). The comments are generally good quality (some even improved the articles), possibly due to the nature of the blog, but they're few.
If spamming and low quality comments are due to open comment systems, I'd still stick with a closed system like Disqus, as I prefer fewer but more motivated comments.
On a funny note, it took me a while to find out that Disqus introduced taboola ads at some point, because I use ad blockers. The moment I found out, I was so horrified that I thought somebody hacked the blog and panicked; it took me a bit to figure out what actually happened :)
P.S. It is ironic that this very page is full of valuable comments :-)
But of course I agree that the great majority of comments that you see are very discouraging.
Either correcting something in the blog, or an update due to new software releases or alternatives that might work in other contexts. Etc.
Extremely helpful and very much appreciated.
That cuts down on the automated spammers, and allows people who are actively following me (not so many people I expect) to offer feedback.
In the past I'd get five-ten comments on a post, these days maybe 1 at the most. It seems like few people comment, either that means nobody reads, or people have no complaints/updates to offer. It is a bit hard to tell.
I tend to post about debian, golang, parsers, and similar random things https://blog.steve.fi/
It's worth noting one major exception to this pattern: Marginal Revolution (https://marginalrevolution.com/) is a very general blog, has a large readership, and still gets good comments on it (a lot of trolls too).
A comment section on a blog only makes sense in the world of spherical cows and friction-less pulleys. The vision is a blog post will start a conversation with readers. The reality is that spammers and trolls will necessitate moderation that will quickly eat the time a blog author might spend having conversations.
Some people might post some really awesome comments, but a small percentage of people ruin the whole thing. So moderation is a necessity if you're going to allow comments. HN obviously allows comments, but it's because HN has dedicated moderators (thank you!).
Most people are not trolls. But there are enough trolls who pee in the pool that many pools have had to be closed.
Ima just go ahead and spam it: https://asemic-horizon.com -- I don't think it's for the median HN dude/tte, but this forum is a meeting of diverse minds...
EDIT: perhaps links to various discussion sites would also be useful.
Yes, due to insane spam and bots and difficulty of managing/moderating, but I appreciate companies and bloggers close to this site/who are fans or at least frequent, including a thread link to their bigger posts here. CloudFlare sticks out
But I now [mostly] hate them
And not just for the spam aspect (though it's a factor)
It's that comments are going to happen where they happen
And some platforms (reddit, hn, twitter, etc) are, quite frankly, better places than trying to selfishly centralize it all to my blog
The audience reach elsewhere is millions of times more than on my blog
edit - only option I tried, but there are alternatives linked in the comments here
People's attention is more dispersed (additionally, several platforms are actively fighting for their attention by using all tricks in the book).
Hence the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped. The people who would leave thoughtful comments are busy with other things.
A few communities still stand (hacker news included).
I also shutdown comments due lack of value, spam.
Comments Reality = Bots, Spam, Strong opinions, showing off etc.
Enjoy writing. Great content will find its way out.
I have spam blockers though.
> The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.
> But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
But HN is more of a meta-blog.
If you want "comments" back you need to be back on usenet and when, perhaps out of a discussion, you decide to made an article instead of a post you just do it on your website (more than "blog", witch are effectively a thing of the past for other reasons) and post the relevant link a a new thread in a relevant ng. Comments happen there, a proper tool for the relative job :-)
The first problem is the asymmetry between downside (substantial) and upside (very little). We don't live in the world we had in 2004. Authoritarian governments and employers (which are basically authoritarian private governments) will find what you say and it will only be used against you. Text's strength and downfall is that it's so easy to index. Any two-bit Spreadsheet Eichmann looking to fire you can do a Google search on you and find something you said 10 years ago.
Podcasts and video essays are taking over. Now, for someone to find something to use against you, he at least has to listen to content--that doesn't scale. (This may change due to widespread adoption of more advanced "AI" algorithms. I'm sure they're already being deployed by authoritarian states.) Of course, these have much higher barriers to entry, which means there's less diversity of voice and more of an emphasis on marketability... but there's still a lot of great content being produced (e.g. breadtube).
Blogs were fun, but their time is over due to the increasing necessity of paranoia to survive. People used to write under their real names. That's unthinkable now, because it's so easy these days for employers and ill-intended governments to find causes to harm people.