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November 6, 2004
The Tragedy of the Comments
Posted by Kevin Marks
Clay's essay on the difference between the social dynamics of mailing lists and blogs expresses well something I've been trying to say for a while - that blogs work better for discussion than mailing lists, because the blogs are owned.
Clay discusses flame wars rather than spam, but the issues are similar - people taking advantage of others' resources without recompense. When comments are turned on on blogs, they eventually fill up with flames and spam too, unless they are carefully maintained.
If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can't really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.
When I try to explain the point of Technorati to people, this hard-to-explain social subtlety is key - it tells you which people are linking to you from blogs, so you can go to their page, and see how what they say about you fits in with the rest of their thoughts. Here's an example for Clay's post on folksonomies.
Comments (6)
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1. Jeff Clavier on November 6, 2004 2:53 PM writes...
In my opinion, the choice of commenting on a blog vs. posting on my blog with a trackback depends on 2 things:
- Is my comment producing a (potential) substantive contribution to the discussion, or is it just a couple of additional data points or a remark ? If it is the latter, than I consider that it does not warrant a post on my blog. But my comment might still add value. So blocking comments means that incremental value additions might be lost in that case.
- Is the topic of the post I am commenting on relevant to my own blog and/or its context ? For example, I happen to comment on French blogs and my blog is only in english. Or I did post comments on the recent election, and my blog is focusing on software and venture capital. And I don’t feel like starting a second blog just for the sake of having miscellaneous posts, comments and unrelated topics gathered somewhere. Though I might decide to do so someday in order to track my contributions on different topics.
A couple of additional remarks: as to comment spamming, I am sure that blog vendors will provide proper solutions to automatically block or remove a good portion of these. Second, I would enforce the usage of login and mechanisms like typekey to avoid anonymous ranting, so that people can stand by their comments.
And finally, I find that it is much easier to read an interesting post and related comments in a flow, rather than following all trackbacks and jumping from blogs to blogs.
Permalink to Comment2. h on November 6, 2004 8:06 PM writes...
a) it's all far more complicated than it should be
Permalink to Commentb) it's almost always "so-and-so wrote a blog post" rather than responding a blog post
c) trackback sucks
d) technorati deeply sucks
3. James Farmer on November 8, 2004 7:59 PM writes...
You're not wrong, have a look at a paper I'm presenting in December (it's just theoretical at the moment, but...):
Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments
http://incsub.org/blog/index.php?p=3
Cheers, James
Permalink to Comment4. Lion Kimbro on November 9, 2004 1:46 AM writes...
You may be interested in a system where leaving a comment on someone's site is roughly the same as putting a comment on your blog.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/OverHear
That is, you can subscribe to a person's activities.
More on the technical model:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/ConversationField
Permalink to Comment5. Ben Hammersley on November 9, 2004 8:42 PM writes...
I think this is wrong. Having mailing list style conversations on weblogs is entirely broken. This is because the linking is in the wrong direction. For someone to follow a weblog conversation, the parent message has to link to the child message. Because the child comes after the parent it requires that the writer of the parent message both a) monitors for children messages (using technorati, naturally) but *most importantly* b) links to all the replies.
I've been a party to many conversations on weblogs, and they have always always always ended with one of the protagonists blanking the opposing view. They just don't link to them. They delete trackbacks. They remove comments. They don't show technorati or referrer information.
After this, the conversation always fractures into two sides, and invariably the two sides cease to have any contact at all and you end up with an echo chamber. On a mailing list, this just can't happen. You don't get flame wars on weblogs, true, but you don't get any meaningful discussion either.
Permalink to Comment6. Roland Tanglao on November 14, 2004 4:36 AM writes...
PubSub will track all links to your site or blog automatically so TrackBack is not needed and it is historically much more reliable than Technorati (although I have high hopes for the recent Technorati revamp). And a blogger can't delete links found by PubSub or Technorati so the conversation can't be deleted unlike Trackbacks which can be deleted.
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