Why not have the best of both worlds? If you really have something to say that's important, lengthy, and worthy of the reflection of your readers, put it in an "essays" section of your site where comments are disabled and link to it in a blog post in the "blog" section, where comments are enabled. People who are only interested in your thoughts will read the essay and then leave. People who want to participate in the discussion can go to the blog post and do so there.
The "comments are noise" attitude presumes most comments have nothing valuable to add (which may be true to various degrees, depending on your readership). But this is a judgment coming from the author's perspective. The comments may be noise to him or her, but might be very valuable to other readers. Even if they seem to discuss tangential minutiae.
I agree with Joel. Before blogs emerged, there were plenty of websites where people opined on various things without feedback from the readers. The expectation that most people have when they go to a blog is that there will be some level of interaction with the author and other readers.
A blog post is pretty much a sermon even if you have a little box where people can leave "comments." That's part of why blogs are amazing. Sermons aren't bad. People discuss sermons. Sermons don't happen in a vacuum, even if you don't have the little comment box. People can discuss whereever they want. Like here.
If discussions had to add significant value, the world would be a very quiet place.
Noise can have social value. Half the comments on HN have little value on their own, but they create a sense of community, a sense of place and belonging. They're part of the identity of a platform. How many of us would care much about HN if it was just links and anonymous votes? There wouldn't be an "us" to begin with, and without an "us", who cares about HN?
I don't think it's worth talking on a blog post or in a technical forum just for social reasons (e.g. I don't think reddit's meme or pun threads would be valuable on hn for their social effect), but I agree with you because I don't think a comment has to add to The Sum Total of Human Knowledge™ for it to be valuable. It just needs to be an interesting thought that the readers aren't likely to have had on their own.
Perhaps a different form of commenting is needed. Instead of showing all comments to everyone, the article author sees all, while the commenter only sees their own. Potentially, the article author could 'promote' worthwhile comments, and allow full discussion threads - on a separate page.
The point of this would be to allow personal discussion with the author, but spam and driveby comments would be discouraged.
One big problem with comments is the isolation. If I leave a comment on a blog, there's little chance that I will return to see responses to it, and I even if I do, it isn't part of my online persona. There's a very asymmetrical relationship between the author to his/her blog, and the commenter to his/her comment. That's why comments don't often match the level that content does.
We are currently experimenting with a solution to this on Hubski. We are allowing some blogs to mirror Hubski discussions of their content on their blog. Here's an example: http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2013/1/28/evolutio... I've long seen many bloggers append a post with "discussion on HN" or "discussed on Reddit". We decided to skip the link, and to allow the thread to be embedded. It's not so much a commenting platform as a mirror to the Hubski discussion. So far it seems to be working well, and we have a cue of blogs waiting to be added.
I should mention that users can follow or ignore users, tags, and domains on Hubski, and what they see is a result of what they follow. I don't think this would work on HN or Reddit, as no one would want every post from a given blog to be submitted automatically.
This does seem to be the idea behind HN (solving the quality discussion problem), so is not a bad place for it, but I think people would frown on every blogger auto-submitting every post, creating a blank discussion that can be linked to from the original. (Ie, using HN like Disqus, without the embed-ability.) It also feels like a reinvention of Usenet to flip every URL into a named-discussion (group).
Comments sections improve blogs because they are a place where readers can point out errors in the parent article.
Sending an email or tweeting the correction is more difficult than making an anonymous comment, and would then need the author to both concede their mistake and take the time to correct the article. Until they do that, everyone who reads the article risks being misinformed.
I can see an argument that comment areas are less necessary on purely opinion blog posts like this one, but on technical blogs they are much more useful, and even on opinion posts I think giving space for dissent is probably a good general rule to follow. For example James Shakespeare seems to base his opinion on the belief that everyone has the same "blog reading algorithm", which I don't think is the case. If there were a comments section I'd post that suggestion, but because of the increased overhead/social investment needed to send an email or tweet I'm not going to bother, and he will probably never read that dissenting opinion.
I do like the idea of the "discuss this post on Hacker News" links you see sometimes. Because some articles are worth discussing, but usually not on some random blog - the point is the audience wants to discuss the article with each other. A blog's audience can be huge or tiny and there is no way to know if the effort of posting a comment is going to be worth it unless you are quite familiar with the blog already, and commenting on a remote site allows you to much more effectively monitor responses and engage with a familiar audience.
> It’s the equivalent of reaching the end of a book and having a mob of other readers immediately descend on you, everyone trying to make their review heard above the fray.
But when you reach the end of a book (and if you liked it), the first thing to do is seek out others' opinions of and discussion of the book, right? It's the same with TV shows; as soon as it's over (on a weekly schedule), people naturally want to discuss it at twop or tvtropes' forum or whatever. Making that discussion easy on your own site just streamlines the process.
It's still not exactly the same, though. I think the point the article makes is that by appending comments to the end of an article, you take away some important personal processing time. While you're navigating to tvtropes, you're still thinking and forming opinions on what you just watched. The streamlining takes away that pause and makes the discussion leak into the original article.
Comment sections on high-traffic news sites such as the BBC perplex me. I go to the BBC to read the BBC news, not people's rants. The sheer volume of comments (hundreds or even thousands) on popular articles there makes the facility next to useless. It is the definition of "the drive-by argument!"
On the plus side, when you're feeling a bit down in the dumps, you can read those comment threads and say to yourself "at least I'm not a complete blathering loon like this wackos".
I never bother to read the comments when I read a blog. Don't care. I get to have discussions here and on Facebook, etc. Blog comments sections are just not used by enough total people (like HN), nor enough people that I actually know (like FB), to be an interesting place to have a discussion, most of the time.
And another side benefit of disabling comments is that it eliminates the need to moderate and filter out botspam for fake Rolexes and herbal supplements for "male enhancement."
I think that sites like Hacker News, Reddit and Facebook are much better for promoting discussion of articles. A problem with comments on blogs is that it's difficult to generate a community.
If you look on any large site that has comments (like The Verge, or YouTube) the comments always descend into jokes and memes.
By posting this article on Hacker News, a discussion has formed and it follows the rules laid out by the Hacker News community, there wont be much name calling or inane jokes.
I strongly disagree, and honestly, I hate the trend of "blog comments are evil!" that networks like Svbtle and Medium are perpetuating.
Yes, the comment systems of major blogs such as Engadget and TechCrunch are filled with filth. (disclosure: I gained my fame/infamy through the TechCrunch comments section). That's when the GIFT and Law of Large Numbers meet, and it isn't pretty.
But high quality content yields high quality content. Articles that are insightful, like analyses that hit the top of HN, don't attract stupidity. Playing curation games with your comments (such as Gawker's "we hide all your comments unless we like you.") alienate your users, and it is somewhat selfish from the author's perspective.
A good compromise is Facebook Comments, which discourages trolls who aren't willing to be anonymous. It doesn't eliminate them, but it's a very strong start, and easy to implement.
I guess it comes down to your perception of how bad comments are, generally. Like, for a given comments section, what percentage is "that's interesting, I'm glad I read that!", what percentage is ignored, and what percentage is "I fear for the future of humanity".
I would say HN has by far the best signal/noise ratio for comments of any site I read, but even here, the "I'm glad I read that" comments are maybe 10% of what's posted and the "I fear for humanity" is about the same.
YouTube or any local newspaper are the extreme examples, pretty much 100% "I fear for humanity" comments.
Ars Technica and The Verge seem to well above average, but they're 5% good/45% ignorable/50% freaking awful.
Engadget or any Gawker site seem to be about average for the Internet, 1% good/10% ignorable/89% freaking awful.
I guess what I'm saying is, with very very few exceptions, my personal experience on most sites (including small blogs with high quality content) has absolutely been that the comments are not only a distraction but almost always just make me depressed if I bother to read them. If I want to read comments on a particular article, I'd much rather do it on HN or (maybe, sometimes) a good subreddit.
For comment systems with both anonymous and non-anonymous commenting (Disqus, LiveFyre), it's very rare (from my experience) that the valuable comments are made by anonymous people.
Most people don't object to providing their identity, but those who do are silenced if there is no anonymous option. It's not worth silencing them, IMO.
It's a little ironic that by not supporting comments/discussion on the page directly they have been outsourced to HN. People will talk about you whether you're in the room or not...
Maybe a better word would be hypocritical, given that it looks like the author submitted it to HN to ignite discussion. It makes me think of the Mango character from SNL.
At a hackathon I built a simple blog system that let one reply to the authors article's individual paragraphs privately and provided a private RSS feed to the commenter for the author to continue a conversation.
The idea being that an anonymous intelligent conversation is possible but the author is probably the most informed on a subject and therefore should be the judge on what is considered good content.
Not sure I entirely agree with this for all cases. One example of a blog post where comments are highly valuable is a highly technical/tutorial style post (be it about coding, mathematics etc.)
Often with articles of this nature, the comments serve as a very swift mechanism to get corrections and bug fixes back to the author - improving the quality of the post for future readers.
Interesting. There is a particular art to fostering a culture of discussion, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying that the signal got drowned out in the noise in most comment threads. And some threads are more enlightening and entertaining than the article above them. Depends on the comment thread.
Visibility is low for actual replies on Tumblr. It doesn't properly facilitate discussion. I can quickly discern that there are 4k+ notes on a post, but I have no indication of how many are reblogs vs licks, let alone reblogs with actual responses.
They aren't blank, they're forwarded to your followers. The design results in chasing links of reblogs from posts and following the people who reblogged to establish followed/follower networks that share values and talk a common language. This is why tumblr is famous for having intense politics.
I consider the combination of "reblog" and "follow" to be a major design win.
>They aren't blank, they're forwarded to your followers.
I meant that there's no easy way to determine which reblogs have actual responses and which are just raw reblogs. The concept of a reblog is great, but the execution isn't.
For all the talk about the design and user behaviors. The author uses some kind of pseudo-highlighting to indicate links. I would not of figured that out if the highlighting pattern didn't match that Wikipedia style so often used.
The "comments are noise" attitude presumes most comments have nothing valuable to add (which may be true to various degrees, depending on your readership). But this is a judgment coming from the author's perspective. The comments may be noise to him or her, but might be very valuable to other readers. Even if they seem to discuss tangential minutiae.
I agree with Joel. Before blogs emerged, there were plenty of websites where people opined on various things without feedback from the readers. The expectation that most people have when they go to a blog is that there will be some level of interaction with the author and other readers.