Tag: comments

the web is what we make it

Clint responds to Audrey’s decision to nuke comments from Hack Education. I agree – it’s unfortunate that douchebags on the internet1 feel that they can abuse people while hiding behind the anonymity of the internet.

It’s Audrey’s decision to nuke comments – and I fully support her in whatever she decides to do – but I hate that she was pushed to it by misogynistic assholes spewing vitriol and hate. That’s not OK. Nobody should feel threatened or devalued or hated for what they write. Nobody should feel like they need to withdraw because some vocal assholes throw bile at them.

I don’t stand for it in The Real World. I don’t stand for it online. It’s simply not OK to treat people that way.

So.

I completely support Audrey in her decision to nuke comments. Her writing is some of the most important stuff in ed tech at the moment, and we need it. We need more of it. And we need Audrey to be able to do her work without having to waste cycles thinking about misogynistic asshole ranters in the comment threads.

She’s not silencing anyone, or crushing freedom of speech. If you have something to say, misogynistic asshole commenters, man the fuck up and create your own blog. Own what you say. Put your name on it. Don’t hide in the comment section of the blog of someone who is working hard to keep education from sliding into corporate solutioneering hell.

  1. they are also douchebags in The Real World, but don’t get to hide behind anonymous internet comments in meatspace [↩]

on rebuilding public spaces

Anil Dash’s recent post on the web we lost, and a follow-up post on rebuilding it, got me thinking about my own little corner of the web. In his follow-up post, he talks about creating public spaces:

Create public spaces. Right now, all of the places we can assemble on the web in any kind of numbers are privately owned. And privately-owned public spaces aren’t real public spaces. They don’t allow for the play and the chaos and the creativity and brilliance that only arise in spaces that don’t exist purely to generate profit.

I’ve really been liking having my blog as a no-comments place for me to just post stuff. I’d been hoping that people would respond (if needed) by writing blog posts of their own and tracking back. But that didn’t happen. Comments happened either via twitter, or by direct email. So the public play and chaos was lost. Is it worth changing direction (again) and re-enabling comments here? Maybe. One way to find out.

In response to Anil’s posts – the web we had hasn’t been lost. Alan and Bonnie triggered something this morning, and I realized it was parallel to suburban development. The funky neighbourhoods of the web are still there, and are still being built, but much of the activity has been gentrified into the suburbs and exurbs of the big box outlets.

So… Although I still feel like having no comments is what works for me, pushing any discussion away from the noise and chaos of public spaces and into various corporate silos isn’t cool.

Whatever. I’ll probably flip-flop again, for like the dozenth time…

(How) do blogs need to evolve?

Interesting discussion about the nature of blogs, blogging, and where this stuff might be going. Some comments jumped out at me:

Paul Bausch:

The whole idea of comments is based on the assumption that most people reading won’t have their own platform to respond with. So you need to provide some temporary shanty town for these folks to take up residence for a day or two. And then if you’re like Matt–hanging out in dozens of shanty towns–you need some sort of communication mechanism to tie them together. That sucks.

So what’s an alternative? Facebook is sort of the alternative right now: company town.

Anil Dash1 :

Yeah, I think Dave’s2 been consistent for years that commenters should get their own blogs; TrackBack was predicated on the idea that was a viable course of action, so it’s certainly not philosophically contrary to what bloggers (used to) want to do.

That being said, I think it’s the on-ramp to participation that’s broken. Not just signing up, but actually thinking "I’m a blogger" is a big mental hurdle, when in fact anyone who’s ever updated their Facebook wall or left a comment is a blogger.

Shanty towns and company towns, rather than walled gardens. Much better descriptions of what these things are now.

Lots more good stuff in the thread. Also of note is that the conversation didn’t happen on a blog per se, but in a beta private-conversation-shared-publicly platform. Strange, but interesting…

via How do blogs need to evolve?.

  1. with another interesting post on the topic here [↩]
  2. Winer, with more here [↩]

on decommenting

I read a whole bunch of posts today on the topic of comments on blogs, triggered by some critiques of Gruber’s Daringfireball which hasn’t ever had comments. Gruber wrote a post about the Google/Admob/Apple drama, and was called out for not having comments on his blog, and how that’s bad form. Gruber responded with this:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response.

and

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.

He’s right. Comments aren’t really conversation or discussion, at least in the way we (meaning the general edublogger community) talk about them. They are often just asynchronous tangents, or even rambling snark fests. Comments are clumsy bits of text, misunderstood or misinterpreted very often.

Now, I have no interest in having a “curated conversation” – whatever the hell that is – but, along the lines of the commonplace book concept, this is my outboard brain. Comments distract from that. With comments, I think – even for a fraction of a second – about potential responses to a post before posting. I’ve deleted dozens of posts, because I figured the comment threads would go astray.

Marco Arment describes blog comments as many-to-one feedback:

A blog post is a one-to-many broadcast. Comments are the opposite: many-to-one feedback. A true discussion medium would encourage more communication between the commenters, forming larger quantities of many-to-many interactions and de-emphasizing the role of the blog post’s author. In practice, that rarely happens.

If comments are behaving as many-to-one feedback, there’s minimal value to showing them to the world, because the world largely doesn’t read them. But the act of showing them to the world — your world, not the commenters’ — creates a setting in which commenters are encouraged to behave negatively.1

We already have a widespread many-to-one feedback medium that avoids this: email. So that’s the feedback system that I allow on my site. Anyone can email me, and I will read it.

Those who truly want to start a discussion usually have their own blogs, so they can write their commentary to their audience.

More, from BoingBoing’s perspective as an absofrackinghuge blog community with comments:

(unrestricted blog comments result in a) a milieux here whereby the comments should be an unfettered, energetic free-for-all. But it’s not just about entitlement … more practically, that results in a noisy, infested mess that drowns out anything of quality.

This, from Derek Powazek, perfectly describes the weight of comments on writing:

I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.

A weight off my shoulders. Interesting.

And this, from Ian Battleridge, on how comment “discussions” break the “link economy”

Comments also massage your ego. “Look,” you can say, “500 comments! I’m popular! And successful!” Comments also break the link economy, because they encourage others to comment directly on your site rather than writing on their own site, linking to you, and potentially getting linked to in return.

So, I thought about these posts. And about how I’ve been thinking and feeling about my blog and how I want to continue using it. And I’ve decided that comments are not helpful for that. If this blog is my Commonplace Book, if it’s my Outboard Brain, I need to be able to write whatever the hell I want, without thinking, even for a second, about what might happen in the comments. I’m not writing stuff here for comments, or for the ego stroke that goes along with them. I’m doing this to think out loud and to document stuff.

I’m really easy to get in touch with. I’m not dropping out or disappearing. If you have something to say, say it. If it’s worth saying in a comment post here, it’s worth anteing up and posting it on your own blog rather than burying it in a comment thread here.

So, for now at least, comments are turned off. I don’t know if that will last, but it’s worth trying.

the twitter effect

Rereading Alan’s post on his blog hiatus, where he takes a month off of posting on his blog to comment elsewhere, I was struck (as always) by the patterns in activity he described. I decided to take a closer peek at the activity on my own blog – I’ve been thinking a lot about discourse analysis lately, so it’s at least partially non-navel-gazing.

Here’s the graph for the first few years of life for my blog. It started out as a private, personal outboard brain, then kind of took off with a life of its own.

a pretty graph, about nothing

Interesting. This blog’s heyday was 2005-2006. A lifetime ago, in intartube years. Then twitter happened in January 2007. It would be _really_ interesting to run some latent content analysis on both posts and comments, to see if they’re different BT vs. AT. Are the activity patterns different? Is the content different? Linking patterns? etc… It’d be completely nonscientific, but fascinating nonetheless…

how to list comments by users in WordPress?

I’ve got a prof using a WordPress site to manage some really active discussions in his course. He’d really like to be able to list all comments posted by each user, as part of the assessment rubric for the course.

I’ve found LOTS of “recent comments” and “popular posts” plugins, and some requests for similar “list all comments for a given user” functionality, but haven’t been able to find anything that fits the bill.

Ideally, the solution would list all contributors to a blog (everyone with accounts), with links to a page (or pages) that lists all of their posts, their pages, and comments.

Any suggestions? Do I get to write another plugin?

Comment troubles (maybe spam-related?)

I've been off-blog for a few days, and haven't had a chance to deal with this yet. I received a couple of email from folks saying they were having difficulty commenting on my blog. I thought maybe Akismet might be blocking them, so I've just switched back to a Drupal 5 development snapshot of Spam.module. Yes, it's a continuing ongoing saga of switching back and forth between Akismet and Spam.module. Hopefully this solves the comment problem without subjecting this blog to a torrential spamstorm.

Akismet is nice, with its distributed spam blocking algorithm (hey! I sound like the schlub on Numb3rs!) but it's essentially a black box – if something goes south, there's no way to fix it from my side of the fence. Spam.module lets me tweak as needed.

Update: It took 7 hours for the first spam to sneak through. Frakking spammers. Time to re-tweak the Spam.module custom rules…

I've been off-blog for a few days, and haven't had a chance to deal with this yet. I received a couple of email from folks saying they were having difficulty commenting on my blog. I thought maybe Akismet might be blocking them, so I've just switched back to a Drupal 5 development snapshot of Spam.module. Yes, it's a continuing ongoing saga of switching back and forth between Akismet and Spam.module. Hopefully this solves the comment problem without subjecting this blog to a torrential spamstorm.

Akismet is nice, with its distributed spam blocking algorithm (hey! I sound like the schlub on Numb3rs!) but it's essentially a black box – if something goes south, there's no way to fix it from my side of the fence. Spam.module lets me tweak as needed.

Update: It took 7 hours for the first spam to sneak through. Frakking spammers. Time to re-tweak the Spam.module custom rules…

Comment Notification by eMail now available again!

Thanks to some great work by Christoph C. Cemper, there is now a module available to enable email notifications for comments by anonymous users (which, on my blog, is everyone but myself) on a Drupal blog. There should now be a “follow comments by email” checkbox underneath the comment submission form, which adds the much-missed feature.

It needs a (minor?) change to the stock comment.module, but Christoph provides a modified version of that. Hopefully the changes aren’t drastic enough to make upgrading Drupal less straightforward.

Thanks to Christoph for his quick work on this (he started on it last night, and has a usable module available before noon today!) I owe you a beer or two for this!

Thanks to some great work by Christoph C. Cemper, there is now a module available to enable email notifications for comments by anonymous users (which, on my blog, is everyone but myself) on a Drupal blog. There should now be a “follow comments by email” checkbox underneath the comment submission form, which adds the much-missed feature.

It needs a (minor?) change to the stock comment.module, but Christoph provides a modified version of that. Hopefully the changes aren’t drastic enough to make upgrading Drupal less straightforward.

Thanks to Christoph for his quick work on this (he started on it last night, and has a usable module available before noon today!) I owe you a beer or two for this!