Comments on: Blogs and comments

By: HP

HP — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 22:39:37 +0000

Jeremy, on Atrios's site at least, Haloscan counts only the last (IIRC) 500 comments. So, if thread C has 250 comments, and thread B has 250 comments, and someone posts "Frist!" on new thread A, then the count on thread C becomes 249. With thousands of posts on Eschaton in the course of a day, you can quickly have FPPs showing a post count of 2 or 6 or 0 when there are in fact several hundred. I don't believe that Atrios edits troll comments at all. If he did, he wouldn't have time to do anything else. I don't know of anyone else getting Atrios's traffic who still uses Haloscan, or we'd see this phenomenon more often.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 16:39:33 +0000

Agreed about Billmon—I keep a hope warm in my heart that he will start posting again… Does anyone know why Atrios’ front page always has wildly inaccurate counts in its links to comments? I formed a speculative theory a while back that when he edits a troll comment that breaks the counter.

By: sara

sara — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 06:03:30 +0000

Another factor is that the blogger should not leave up open threads. If he or she is going to be away from the blog for any length of time, he or she should arrange guest bloggers. Billmon’s effective demise may have been due to this problem; he went to an econ conference in Jordan and left up open threads for most of a week. The Whiskey Bar became a snowballing party, the teen party when the parents are away: friends of friends of friends show up. The comment threads ran to 500 or more each. The comments were always unmoderated, of course, and attracted a more and more extreme class of leftist (though I myself am probably somewhat to the left of Crooked Timber regulars). When Billmon returned from Jordan, he acted as if they’d trashed the Bar. He had, to be sure, invited negative comments with his Fahrenheit 9/11 post. If some of the readers here don’t agree with Billmon’s politics or economics, nevertheless he did a thorough job (at a relatively early stage) of debunking the war and the Bush administration, producing unusually long and analytic posts; he is missed.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 22:37:58 +0000

I agree BP in the election runup is a counterexample, but I think it’s a special case. The focus is on polls and Labor’s chances, with only a handful of anti-Labor commenters.

By: Peter Murphy

Peter Murphy — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:20:50 +0000

My second observation is that, beyond a certain size (roughly 100 comments) comments threads become unmanageable, degenerating into flame wars, pointscoring cascades and all the other pathologies of Usenet. Another counterexample is Back Pages, where half the threads in the last couple of weeks have hit the 200 mark. The high hit rate has been connected with the upcoming Australian election. Back Pages has had almost consistently good commentatory - miles from the Preznit give me turkee fare known on some other blogs.

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 14:26:26 +0000

Kos has nested comments. IIRC Kos and Atrios are two of the biggest blogs going, if not among the oldest, and they have comments. The obvious commentless big blogs – Instapundit, Sullivan – are on the right. I never read Kevin’s comments any more, even when I comment there (as today, on Going Upriver). I have to agree about Josh’s air of authority. Imagine that site with comments.

By: Chad Orzel

Chad Orzel — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 12:37:35 +0000

The point about the Nielsen Hayden empire is surely that a high proportion of posters know each other outside the blogs, or would like to. This, on its own, and without disemvowelling, wouldn’t be enough. But I don’t think disemvowelling alone would work, either. For Internet values of “know,” anyway. A lot of those people know each other largely through their participation in the nielsenhayden.com comments, and other online discussions (Usenet, etc.). I think that does help a bit, but it’s nowhere near enough. I’ve seen fairly close-knit Usenet groups, where everybody knew one another, dissolve into the same sort of chaos you see in the Calpundit Monthly comments. The moderation and disemvowelling are key—if you can keep things civil long enough, even strangers will get to know each other, and you can have some community policing as well. I talked to Teresa about this a bit at Worldcon, and she had some interesting things to say. The two points that I particularly remember were: 1) you can allow anonymous posting, or you can have unmoderated comments, but you can’t have both (this was in reference to problems at BoingBoing), and 2) you can allow one idiot troll to be active for a little while, but once you get a second, you have to stomp on both of them immediately. (Sort of like the theory that you need to shoot the first looter, or things will quickly get out of hand to the point where you can’t shoot them all…)

By: ArC

ArC — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 10:59:37 +0000

Aren’t there some blogs that use PHPBB or something similar for comments? I think those, designed as actual discussion forums, are much more suited to what you’re suggesting than the usual unthreaded comment system.

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 09:16:38 +0000

There definitely are some that have disabled comments. Matthew Yglesias did so briefly. I don’t remember if Brian Leiter ever had comments, but he certainly acts as if he doesn’t need them now. I wonder if cutting off comments increases the pressure on a blogger’s inbox, as more readers feel the need to e-mail her comments rather than just putting them on the comments section, where she can feel free to ignore them.

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 08:00:50 +0000

By: David Tiley

David Tiley — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 06:29:55 +0000

Looking at it from the point of view of a small blogger with limited comments – I feel completely strange if I have to turn them off for any reason. Suddenly I am ranting into the void, with no feedback except strange statistics. I suspect people who run blogs without comments tend to be public intellectuals getting other kinds of feedback. I notice The Poor Man used to have nested comments (tree view?) and dropped the idea. I reckon the number of comments dropped off as a result, so they are now manageable in a straight line.

By: Thersites

Thersites — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 05:06:35 +0000

OK, but the blogosphere is wide enough to encompass all of these models and more. Atrios has a very popular and almost completely unmoderated or in even in any way regulated comments section, with some of the worst commenting software on earth, and this has not hurt him any. Incidentally, as an Atrios regular myself, I’d bet that at least half of his regulars have postgraduate degrees. Probably a third of his regulars have doctorates. And we like cursing a lot.

By: Jamie McCarthy

Jamie McCarthy — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 04:20:04 +0000

Tree view is pretty much a requirement past about 40 comments. Somewhere beyond 100, I think discussions without some kind of moderation become impossible. With decent moderation, which means either paid staff or community moderation, the manageable upper limit seems to be as high as 2500 comments (there are a very few counterexamples at http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml ). I gave a talk on protecting a discussion forum from attacks that range from “comment flooding” to “people saying stupid things”—I still don’t have my notes online but a good summary is linked from my site, here: http://mccarthy.vg/article.pl?sid=04/08/02/0348253 I agree that blogs with comments have a very different feel; further, those that display comments inline with the main entries have a different feel from those that require a separate click. Maybe n years from now when everyone has a blog, comments will be more like what we call TrackBacks now, where everyone hosts their own content and aggregates it with others’…

By: BigMacAttack

BigMacAttack — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 04:05:40 +0000

I don’t really completely believe what I am about to kinda say. It really doesn’t fit with being a conservative. But what about a tree view? Why isn’t this done more or at all? Wouldn’t it solve many problems with large comments? Msybe it just leads to a more fractured discussion and a loss of community? But I am curious and wonder why it isn’t implemented more.

By: Ayjay

Ayjay — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 03:43:23 +0000

I wonder if it might be possible in some circumstances for bloggers—especially bloggers who write very well—to improve their reputations by allowing no comments. That is, someone who can make a point eloquently and who never allows anyone to refute or correct them on the same page could achieve a potentially unwarranted air of authority. Far be it from me to mention any names—just consider this a Talking Points Memo. . . .