Re/code made news this week by eliminating comments on the site, noting that most of the discussion about their articles was happening elsewhere. In the larger scheme of things, “Don’t read the comments” is widely regarded as universally good advice. This makes me more interested in sites with healthy communities of commenters.
As far as I can tell, comments are as good as the people running sites want them to be. If they invest in building a community, healthy comment sections tend to spring up. If not, they don’t. Fred Wilson makes the same argument in Comments Are Dead, Long Live Comments, and of course his site has one of the most active (and generally constructive) comment sections of any blog you’ll read.
I’ve had comments enabled on rc3.org for a long time, but I police them pretty heavily, both for spam and for idiocy. Lately posts don’t get too many comments, probably because I don’t post as much as I’d like. I’ve always been proud of the comments here, though. They make the site better.
November 24, 2014 at 3:05 pm
After years at scoffing at the spam implications of Ted Nelson’s notion of transclusion, I’m now wondering if that, coupled with some client-based notion of who we choose to read, will be the next commenting. I’m not a fan of WebMention, but the associated Microformats2 stuff that the IndieWebCamp are developing could lead us to comments being something that happens in our aggregators.
And I think there’s value there…