Thoughts On Commenting
A lot of the blogs I read don’t offer comments and generally I don’t miss it. The few that do allow comments, I read the post and try to read the comments if I’m interested in the topic. Thanks to the way I try to control the blogs I read, the comments that I do read usually leave me feeling like it was worth while and added value to the initial post. On the larger blogs, which have really become more than blogs in the traditional sense of the word, the comments usually descend into anarchy and trolling. I never read the comments on these blogs, and in all honesty mostly just skim over the post unless it really grabs me in the first paragraph or two.
You can easily draw the conclusion from this that there is more than one form of comment to a blog post. There is the considered comment that adds to the conversation and there is the noisy comment which adds to the general din. In my experience, and disappointingly so, the noisy comment that adds to the general din is the most common. People don’t have the time to offer up something more considered, and those that would make the comments worth reading are so busy that they don’t comment at all. It’s understandably easy, rightly or wrongly, to draw the conclusion that commenting is on it’s way out. Which is why when I read this paragraph in the newly launched Cognition, aka The Happy Cog Blog, I was intrigued.
Speaking of experiments, there’s our comments section. Everybody knows inline blog comments are going the way of the BBS and Gopher sites of yore. We’re not ready to say “comments are dead” (we’ll leave that for Wired Magazine’s next cover story) but we have noticed the smell, and we’re doing something about it.
It seems that they, along with a lot of you, have noticed what I have spoken about above. I read on with interest to see what new system they had thought of was, in the hope that it could potentially bring a shift from noisy comments to conversational comments.
Kids today are more likely to respond to a blog post on Twitter than in the article’s comments section; so we’ve collocated our comments on Twitter. Share a tweet-length response here, and, with your permission, it will go there.
Upon reading their solution I was disappointed. It turns out their solution is the ability to comment via Twitter. From the post there is a tweet box, you give permission and your tweet goes out to the world. At the same time it’s added to the post, in the same manner as a conventional comment using a conventional form.
Straight away I wondered what’s the difference between a noisy comment and using the method Happy Cog have gone with to comment? The comment still has to be made from their page for it to appear in the right place. The display of comments is still the same, ie. a big long list that takes lots of scrolling to read. The only difference really is a low barrier to entry–because I’m already logged into Twitter–, a limit of 120 characters1 and a tweet that appears as a comment to the post as well as appearing out of context in my Twitter stream. Whilst the traditional comment form is open to abuse, and any mildly popular post can play host to trolls and the like, it did at least give potential for intelligent debate.
I can understand the appeal behind trying to develop new ways of commenting, but I question the use of Twitter as a solution. The number of tweets I see in relation to a post are limited, most tweets of this kind offer a link to a post as a quick way of sharing, maybe with a sentence to sum up or offer a quick off the cuff remark. Is this really the type of conversation that should be encouraged? Shouldn’t we instead be looking for a more robust method of commenting? If a post is worth commenting on, surely it deserves more than 120 characters that can easily be lost in a sea of other 120 character remarks? The traditional sense of commenting at least allows those who have put thought and consideration to stand out from the crowd in the fact that their often long comment will stick out above the short one liners that generally occur.
Of course there will always be the oldest form of commenting on the web in the form of a post on your own blog.
If you are moved to respond with more than 140 characters, post the response on your website, and it will show up here.
That’s the solution we should be encouraging more of.
- I know a tweet is 140 characters, but Happy Cog have to attach their URL to your tweet.
