The Failure of the Comment Debate

You may or may not know this, but I used to run a fairly successful blog. From 2002 until 2008, under a completely different pseudonym than any that I use now, I wrote a grand total of 1.5 million words, on a rather idiosyncratic set of subjects, reaching an audience that ranged from about 2,000 to 1,000 people a day.

During that time, I wrote a total of 2,995 posts, with a total of 9,079 comments across the lot, and I think I had a grand total of five negative comments.

The problem that I have with any current debate about the integrity or value of comments on a blog, is that in the entire fifteen years since the notion of blogging first emerged on the fledgling interwebs, the standard idea of what a comment is hasn’t changed one iota.

Comments are always displayed as afterthoughts, with no integral link back to the content above them. The ‘add your comment’ form acts like a monumental full stop to the piece the author essentially pasting their opinion up as if it was a proclamation on a stage, and then skulking into the stalls with the rest of the audience to participate in a ‘discussion’ (if they do that at all most simply walk away and choose not to engage with the Hoi polloi).

It strikes me as practically medieaval, this notion of the article as the definitive declaration of opinion especially in an age and a medium where everything is constantly in motion. Far better, I always thought, to regard the posting of an article as the opening of a conversation a conversation that incorporates the opinions and viewpoints of your readers in a way that allows yourself to be questioned, and gives you a direct way to answer those questions.

…

For the record, the way mine used to work (and would still work on that neglected current implementation of mine, were I in the mood for having a conversation again), was that instead of herding all the comments after I’d posted something into a separate database, they got inserted into the main body of the text (and converted into an avatar + speech bubble by some nifty regex). There was no end to each of the posts if someone commented on one then I’d just pick up where I left off and reply to them. It was a continuous conversation, rather than a series of statements followed by an unruly debate.

The point I’m trying to make, isn’t that I think my little system was anything approaching a solution to the current state of internet commenting it took a huge effort on my part to curate the conversation, and was exhausting and frustrating at times it’s that simple declarations of “Comments = good!” and “Comments = bad!” fail to grasp the opportunities that our new myriad of communication tools have given us.

I wish I had something pithy or witty to say but as you know, I agree with this wholeheartedly so I will simply say

1st! pwn3d!