The Death Of Comments
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.
Newspapers should not have comments
This amazing WSJ article that everyone’s talking about, A Manifesto for Slow Communications, has only three comments - all pretty lame ones. People are discussing it on their blogs, via Twitter, in real life. But the three comments sit there wrongly representing the success of the article, newspaper readers’ engagement, the WSJ’s “digital strategy,” and the importance of reader feedback.
If comments were turned off, journalists would be more likely to go to other blogs and Twitter and read the real conversation, infusing their follow up articles with fresh ideas and relevancy. That’s what I do with my blog.
Plus we all know newspaper commenters are completely psycho nutbags so no one would miss it. In fact turning the comments off would make reading a news site more pleasant for the rest of us.
The majority of comments re: newspaper articles that I read on blogs, or on twitter, are well thought out, often dissenting, and are open to the possibility that they’ve missed something.
The majority of comments re: newspaper articles that I read on newspaper websites fall somewhere between ignorant and offensive, normally about 1/5th treading close to being racist.
I would not miss comments, were they eliminated from the sites of every newspaper I read. Commentary that isn’t connected to an identity is rarely insightful, as people LIKE to claim insight, and generally cling to anonymity in the face of oppression, or to be a dick.
Facebook Connect and Owning Reputation.
Anonymity is dying, and that’s probably a good thing in regards to online conversation and communication.
As more and more services switch to Facebook Connect as an authentication option, Facebook will become a very valuable arbiter of reputation. A service that will happily delete your profile if your name sounds too fake, Facebook has made no effort to hide the fact that it’s supposed to be about real people, and real lives. Facebook has also been making attempts to tie your actions to their social graph for a while - the first major attempt, with Beacon, scared the crap out of people. Facebook Connect is a better solution, because it’s not packaged as a way to attach your real world identity, and therefore reputation, to your actions. Connect is sold to users as a way of reducing the hassle of logging in to leave comments.
But it solves the reputation problem, which has been plaguing anyone trying to have important real world conversations online, for as long as people have been trying to have important real world conversations online.
Facebook ties your name, and a small (and optional) amount of biographical information to your friends, your actions in the Facebook ecosystem, and images and events. When it starts connecting that identity to all the comments you make online, blog conversations, arguments and opinions, it will be the best barometer available for reputation.
It’s entirely foreseeable that Facebook could functionally own individual reputation online. Which is why, from my point of view, any conversation about them being in competition with Twitter misses the point entirely.
