Blog comments are dying off. This isn’t sad, it’s a natural evolution.
Many of my favourite bloggers, and people, have been reduced to flat out asking people to comment more, in posts, on twitter, and sometimes in conversation. It makes sense, commenting was currency at one point, it was an indicator you’d said something intelligent, conversation starting, insightful or controversial. But I’ve been noticing something of a trend of declining comments, and I think it’s probably a good thing.
Comments are an attempt to corral the conversation, which is generally the worst plan in social media.
The refrain has been coming for a few years now - the brand of the future won’t have a web page, it will have a dozen presences on existing sites, each tailored to the audience that dwells there. I have a feeling this is related to the decline in blog comments - the people who most want to interact with content, use it to start a conversation, or discuss it with the author - they have their own forums.
Blog comments have moved to twitter, or youtube, or facebook, and to our own blogs. They’ve moved to places where we can bring the conversation, and our ideas, to the audiences and friends that we have established individually. When I comment on your blog, I am talking to you, and maybe, if both of us are lucky, the community of people who read your blog on the page where it’s published, rather than in RSS. In realistic terms, other than a means of speaking with the writer, commenting on a blog is putting your words into a corner, and forgetting to tell them time out is over.
When a friend, company or colleague suggest building their own social network, building their own place to host a community and a conversation, I always ask why. I almost never receive a satisfactory answer. Are you going to build a community better than Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn has? Are you going to attract more users than them to yet another service, but this time with such a niche focus that you’re asking them to segment their lives another step further? If your product, your brand, your niche so essential that people will craft another online persona just to interface with it?
If so, we should really go for coffee ;)
And if not, you need to stop trying to own the conversation and the community. You need to start feeling lucky that you get to participate in it, and start figuring out how you’re going to serve it.
Most importantly, you need to stop being disappointed that people are talking about how much they like you in public, rather than waiting until they are inside your living room to do so.
