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Comments versus Conversation

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I have a huge amount of respect for Kyle Weems. Not only is he an excellent visual artist, creator of the beautiful CSSquirrel comic — which, incidentally, looks gorgeous on an iPad screen — he is also the owner, and distributor, of some top-notch opinions on all-things web. Naturally, I agree with almost all of those opinions. So it’s really a red-letter day when something Kyle says doesn’t quite sit right with me.

Recently, Kyle wrote about his decision to disable comments on his blog, something which several other blogs I frequent have either done or, having never had comments in the first place, er, haven’t. He suggests that Twitter is an excellent alternative to in-place blog comments, since the conversation’s already going on there anyway (amongst other reasons).

Here was my immediate response:

To reinforce my point that Twitter is not — and cannot be — the last word in conversation, I’ll expand my reasoning here.

Twitter as conversation medium

First off, Twitter is not great for conversation. Not only are tweets far too short for meaningful analysis of any great length, the whole threading / ‘View conversation’ mechanism is pretty flawed. Pretty much every time I try to follow a ‘conversation’ on Twitter, I find myself frustrated. People don’t use hashtags perfectly. Often, replies aren’t real replies, they’re just tweets with an @mention.

Twitter is not entirely egalitarian when it comes to conversation, either. If @zeldman tweets something, many of his near-300,000 followers will engage in a conversation. If he has something to say on a topic, people will listen. That’s less likely for those of us with an — ahem — more modest following. When it comes to blog comments, however, everyone’s equal. One comment is — give or take — just as likely to be read as another.

Finally, Tweets are quite … ephemeral. They fade out of view, stop showing in search results, and generally tend to drift away from a central discussion. This brings me onto the second point:

Conversation fragmentation

Kyle also suggests responses in the form of blog posts as another alternative. Just like this one. Obviously, I consider that an acceptable option, but I’m not convinced it’s a better alternative because:

  • Not everyone has their own blog, on which they can respond.
  • Despite attempts to solve the notification problem, blog posts rarely include, or even link to, such responses, and certainly don’t ever really do this in a satisfactory manner.
  • Splitting the conversation between multiple competing blogs creates an awful lot of work for someone trying to follow that conversation.

Whether responses to a blog post are made via Twitter, or another blog, the conversation becomes fragmented. The ideal place, in my opinion, for a conversation to develop around a blog post is directly next to that post, where the reader already is.

Spam, trolls, and vitriol

Kyle’s post also makes the — entirely valid — point that an awful lot of comment content is less than constructive. In extreme cases, it demonstrates the depressing nadir of human communication: nowhere is this more evident than YouTube. However:

  • Content on YouTube — primarily entertainment, rather than information or informed debate — probably lends itself to triviality
  • Moderation (of one form or another) can help to mitigate this problem
  • Identified commentators are certainly more respectful than anonymous ones. Jeff Atwood introduced the ‘identify yourself’ requirement to comments on his blog for this very reason.

I suspect this is the real reason why many people disable their blog’s built-in commenting feature: keeping on track of all that comment spam is just a pain. However, I remain highly sceptical that the best way of solving that problem is to disable commenting altogether. A blog without comments is still, in my mind, not really a blog.


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