Comments On Comments

Glenn Fleishman wrote this little GEM in Jeff Jarvis' comments over at BuzzMachine. Wow! He was reacting to a long thread from this post where there were some contentious comments posted.

If you're new to reading blogs -- this will prove to be the "Dummy's Guide to Blog Comments" and quite eludicating. If you're not new to blogs, you'll want to give Glenn a nice big hug and a kiss next time you see him. Hosannah!

He also deals quickly with the good reasons many of us don't bother to have comments on our sites.

This was an interesting thread because it shows the best and worst aspects of commenting. I typically see seven kinds of comments on my blogs:

1. Intelligent, germane remarks, which may be supportive or critical of what I have posted or, if a link, to the story in question.

2. Expansive remarks that provide more detail about the subject in question, often from the principals (cf. Mena, above)

3. Discussions that form in the comments section that are germane and useful to the discussion at hand (everyone in this thread)

4. Off-topic remarks or poorly written remarks that don't extend and expand on the comment.

5. Ad hominem attacks, rudeness, stupidity. (These posters always claim, when confronted, to not be exhibiting this behavior; viz., above.)

6. People who don't understand that the comments are for specific articles and post totally weird things, like requests to order books or sell stuff.

7. Comment spam.

Categories 4 to 7 led me to turn off comments altogether on my blogs until a better solution existed. This includes wifnetnews.com, which often generates a large number of good posts in the 1 through 3 category, even when they're totally critical of my point of view (but not rude or attacking the site).

The biggest problem I've found is category 4. People who cannot recognize their own tone are often wily enough to be able to register, enter obscured text, confirm their email address -- these are the folks that moderation solves the problem of.

I really want an integrated system that requires verification of a post (so the TypeKey solution provides me a mechanism of verification) and moderation of a post (so that I as a site operator can choose whether a post is in categories 1 to 3 or 4 to 7).

I've run mailing lists for years, and when I was running the Internet Marketing discussion list back in 1994-1996 (Jeff Bezos and many other folks who were evolving companies were members), I ran it moderated. I would have problems with posters every few weeks in which someone wanted to post every damn thing they thought of. I would reject, and sometimes explain.

These folks would scream bloody murder at me. Fine, I would reply. If you want an unmoderated forum, then you should create one. I will even link to it and promote it as a forum in which moderation isn't the key. And you know what happened: a couple people started an unmoderated forum and it devolved into useless nonsense and spam within a couple of months.

Meanwhile, my list grew from 1,000 in the first week (in 1994) to 7,000 by 1996 when I shut it down because the conversation had become tedious and useless. I did promote some new lists that formed, none of which lasted longer than a few years themselves.

The point (I've meandered) is that moderation is a good thing and validation of an identity is good thing *for the people running sites*. They may not be the best thing for people who want to post comments. In which case, the way the blogosphere works is that you post comments on your own blog, and TrackBack, Google, RSS readers, and other tools link your ideas to the offending post.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at March 20, 2004 03:41 PM