Allowing comments on blogs

When I started in blogging, comments hadn’t been invented yet for that software. I haven’t added it because I have a mailto link at the site; if anyone wants to contact me, they can do it.

The presence or absence of comments doesn’t make or break a blog. Good writing makes a blog worth reading.

I’m sure some of us academic types have had the experience of giving a long lecture to a crowded room, and not getting a single question or response out of the mess. That, to me, is what a blog without comments would be like. Even if it’s nothing but negative criticisms, I want some evidence that I’m not just talking to myself.

Besides, if I write something and it just sits there, it’s as if I’m done with it. Reader comments are good ways to remind me that the work of thinking is never done.

As for the work of maintaining a comments section, it’s easy if you’re low in the hierarchy like I am, but what makes it even easier if you refuse on principle to take any responsibility for what other people say. I don’t worry about policing the comments section at all — I treat it as a commons for everyone. I do rip out spam, but that hasn’t been much of a concern yet. Otherwise…I may be militantly godless and unpityingly cruel to creationists, but some of my longest-running comments threads were fueled by true-believers and anti-evolutionists. And that’s perfectly OK with me.

But are blogs supposed to be democratic, particularly? I’m not sure I understand why the fact that they’re not democratic is a concern. Books aren’t democratic either. Nor are plays, movies, tv shows, songs, symphonies, paintings, sculptures.

Blogs with comments are more of a conversation than blogs without, but it doesn’t seem to me that either one is somehow more a ‘real’ blog than the other.

I don’t have comments on my blog because I don’t know how to activate the comments feature on Blogger–if indeed there is one. I’ve meant to poke around and try to see if I could fix it up for comments–and now I probably will.

Blogs that don’t have comments don’t appeal to me–however interesting the content, the format is more like a speech or sermon than a lecture where there’s at least the possibility of argument. It isn’t that I consider them undemocratic–I just like argument.

I didn’t mean to suggest that blogs need to be democratic. I was picking up on the conversation Laura had started on her own blog. She expressed a concern about blogs not being democratic (maybe it wasn’t a concern per se, just a thought, but she did seem to be concerned about their undemocratic nature) and I found this especially curious from someone whose comments are not turned on.

What are blogs anyway then? A frequently updated Web site with commentary of some sort? But that doesn’t distinguish them from certain sites we wouldn’t call a blog (e.g. NYTimes.com). I realize it’s a moving target and as I said in my post, it’s probably not possible to find a definition that works for everyone (or for every site called a blog), but that in and of itself is interesting.. and a bit frustrating when trying to explain it to someone who has never heard of it before.

Why would being more “democratic” be a desirable characteristic in a blog? “Democracy” is a desirable characteristic in a government, because important decisions are being made, which result in real impacts on people. A blog is a public diary – a vanity piece for the writer. If the blogger wants feedback, in the form of comments, then comments should be turned on. If not, then not – it is the blogger’s personal space.

The blogosphere itself is perfectly democratic. Anyone with access to an internet connection can set up a blog. Anyone can read whatever blogs they want. Those blogs which produce good and agreeable material attract readers – that is the democratic bit – it is also the capitalistic bit.

What Eszter is advocating with “democratic” comments isn’t democracy, it is philanthropy. Bloggers “should” give back by giving audience to whatever crackpot comes along. A truly “democratic” blog would have Eszter putting up to a vote of the readership what he writes about, what position he takes, and even what opposing positions he allows in comments. Democracy is not liberty – a democratic government can oppress minorities – especially minority opinions – just as easily as a tyrant can. Democracy imposed sodomy laws, the patriot act, blue laws, Jim Crow, even slavery. It is devotion to liberty, not democracy, which protects the freedom of speech blogs depend on. Liberty depends on rights.

Eszter here is claiming there is a “right” to comment on blogs – that readers have a right to give feedback, not just to the writer, but to all readers as well, and without this feature, – a weblog isn’t a blog. The bandwidth, storage, and the blog itself aren’t the writer’s to do with what he wishes, they are the readership’s. To the extent that a blog is “produced”, this is communal ownership of the means of production, ie socialism.

Personally, I spend more time on blogs with comments than without – but I value Volokh, Tacitus, and CT similarly, despite their…varied…approach to comments. CT is the only one I’m allowed to comment on – I’ve never managed to make Tacitus’ sign up work – but I consider all three to be blogs. Volokh is a blog, Tacitus is a blog with a members-only, topical forum, and CT is is a blog with a moderated, or even unmoderated, topical forum. I consider all three to be appropriate to the goals and needs of their owners, and their readers.

A blog without comments is like a car without a navigation system, not like a car without an engine. (Or for that matter, a fish without a bicycle.) It is still a car, just a little less luxurious.

I have to agree with you on this one. Comments are an integral part of a blog for me. What is a blog without comments? If blogs are to be democratic and are to build community don’t they have to give people the opportunity to respond to what it is the blogger writes? Aren’t blogs supposed to open up a broader community of thinkers/scholars/writers/bloggers?

Many people do not have comments turned on because they do not know how to. It took me a bit of time to get round to turning on haloscan on my blogger blog.

There are many problems with the blogosphere as currently established. My biggest complaint is the lack of good tools to find decent blogs. Blogrolls tend to be fire and forget, and most simply reference the same small set of blogs.

I think that much more could be made of Atom/RSS. With syndication it does not in principle matter whether the author turned on comments, another site could run comments on another blog as annotations.

I think that this would be a fun thing to do on the right wing blogosphere, almost none of which dare turn on comments these days. Things have come a long way in the past three and a half years, back in 2000 nobody could run a left wing forum without it being infested with libertarian trolls shouting down anyone who does not accept their religion. Now it is the right who are on the defensive.

The scaling problem remains. It is hard because an ‘objectionable’ comment may also be true and justified. It is fair comment to note on a pro-Milosevick blog that the guy is evidently a mass murderer. It is fair comment on a right wing blog attacking Edwards as ‘inexperienced’ to point out that its not experience that counts, its what you learn from experience that counts, Bush and Cheney evidently have learnt nothing. And yes it is fair comment on a pro-Israel post to point out that the situation will never change until Israel accepts its own role in creating its current circumstances.

Moderation can work, but only to a limited degree. There is a group of republicans who try to moderate down my slashdot posts and a group of lefties who moderate them up (often the score cycles repeatedly between +5 and -1).

Give me a forum and I will use it to promote my political views. The problem as I see it is not the entry of libertarian or other ideological views, it is the attempt to drown out contrary views.

Back in 1992 the denizens of talk.politics.guns got bored of their own group which pretty much everyone who was not an NRA fanatic knew to avoid. So they went on what was known in soc.culture.british as the ‘gun nut road show’, led by one Timothy McVeigh (yes, THAT one). The idea of this group was pretty much to shout down every contrary view.

I was thinking “calpundit” along with Sebastian.

I used to read the comments there, and like here, they were typically on topic and interesting enough to at least skim.

Now though, it’s not worth the time (I think is had started before he got the Monthly spot, he has become more shrill in the past year, provoking more heated responses). Pages and pages of scree. Somehow, he still manages to look at them, but I’m sure I’m not alone in ignoring them now. The thought of having to maintain something like that is daunting.

I wish all bloggers would turn on the trackback feature, whether or not they have comments. Trackback is very useful for locating good new blogs.

On the other hand, the existence of comments on a blog doesn’t necessarily make it a blog either.

Some of the broadcasts on “Air America” radio have their own “blogs”, where listeners can discuss the shows. They are called ‘blogs’, but end up being Discuss the show threads followed by 400 comments from listeners.

Is a weblog that is 90% “Open Threads” really a blog? What about a blog that has no membership requirements, like the Political State Report where anyone and his aunt can sign up and be the local blogger from Ohio? It certainly looks like a blog, but without excluding any potential bloggers, is it really any different from a Bulletin Board?

For a blog like CT, comments work well: a niche audience of smart people. For WaMo, Instapundit, Atrios, Kos to some extent: Dear Lord. It’s all about setting rules, up to a point beyond which it’s just impossible to enforce them. Technology helps.

I have a pragmatic reason for not having comments on my blog: namely, that I think that (supposing people did in fact comment) I would spend more time that I can currently afford to spend, pre-tenure, monitoring/reading/responding to comments. I agree that it’s generally better in various respects to have comments, but I gotta not do what I gotta not do.

Oh, and to respond to Ophelia Benson way upthread….

I suppose blogs don’t have to be democratic, but to the extent that they form an emerging political public sphere, well, many (but not all) theories of democracy would suggest that it would be better for such a sphere to have democratic rather than undemocratic qualities, all else being equal.

I like blogs with comments. I want to talk about the issues that get raised with other interested people. I read a few blogs that lack comments just because the writers are So Damned Good (Kleiman, Marshall, Billmon) but even with those, I often find myself racing off to Atrios, Yglesias, or Drum to wade into the comments thread–one of them is sure to link to anything interesting that the no-comment blogs put up.

Comments have different purposes, and that’s partly thanks to the technologies involved and the nature of the posters.

The comments at Atrios/Eschaton — driven by pop-up Haloscan, entirely separate from posts — are truly more like a chatroom, pulling up snippets for subsequent posts. They’re not accessible as a long-term archive, nor should they be. It’s all about flow. The noise is the signal.

CT’s comments are more focused, have more signal, work better. There are still a few ‘moments’ — and I have to nod to my friend dsquared when Mark Bernstein mentions how comments mean ‘you can’t ignore an insult in your own home’ — but they’re relatively infrequent. Brad DeLong’s site hovers on the cusp between focus and sprawl, Billmon’s went over the edge.

There are blogs without comments in which the lack of comments is a bloody red rag. I’m thinking, of course, of a certain law professor, who has cultivated an echo-chamber. But that’s because Reynolds is primarily a linker and three-word insinuator, rather than a writer of… well, paragraphs. It’s easier to justify not having comments if you write substantial pieces. (Billmon won’t have trouble. Josh Marshall doesn’t.)

Finally, there are those whose squirmy attitude towards receiving feedback is itself amusing. I can think of one person who set up a UBB and then complained, in essence, that the discussions were not sufficiently obsequious because they offered corrections and clarifications to his already-verbiose output. Result: no UBB any more.

And for those who mention, rightly, that Kevin Drum’s comments section has gone to the dogs since his discussion of the Bush military records — please, Kevin, turn them off, please! — I remember when it was possible not just to read entire threads on Slashdot, but also be able to post to them before 600 other people.

Now, while Slashdot posts still have the meat in the comments threads — you just have to dig really, really hard to find them — the comments for Kevin’s site, especially in its new home, are like a pair of lead boots. I don’t visit the site as much now, and it’s a pity.

“I suppose blogs don’t have to be democratic, but to the extent that they form an emerging political public sphere, well, many (but not all) theories of democracy would suggest that it would be better for such a sphere to have democratic rather than undemocratic qualities, all else being equal.”

Hmm. But to what extent do blogs “form an emerging political public sphere”? A very circumscribed respect, I would think. By no means all blogs are political, or even tangentially political. I think of them as a kind of writing, and I’m extremely cautious, not to say suspicious, about the idea that kinds of writing should be democratic.

CT’s comments generally add to the site due to the (apparant!) high intelligence and education of some of the commentators, and preparedness to engage in debate rather than name-calling.

I am concerned that “paid-trolls” could ruin the blogosphere in the next 5 months due to the US elections.

I’m a fan of comments, but that’s not why I’m commenting. I’m commenting because I’m getting a little tired of the use of the word democracy to refer to things which have diddly-squat to do with governing. Ditto the use of the word to imply fairness, justice, egalitarianism, and so on. Here’s a handy heuristic to decide if “democracy” is a good word for the thing you are trying to describe: If the thing in question does not permit philosophers to be forced to drink hemlock, it’s not a democracy :-)

Kidding aside, it would be nice to see the word retain some measure of meaning rather than continuing to slide into meaning anything inclusive and participatory – after all, we still need a word to describe systems of government which permit the people to vote to oppress minorities.

I liked comments, not because I think they make the blog more democratic but because they add extra content. At Making Light, there’s a note to the effect that if you’re not reading the comments you’re missing half the fun. You get to participate in all kinds of enjoyable debates that may be sparked by the original entry but soon drift into other regions.

On my blog, I’ve got comments enabled but don’t have enough of a readership to get much more than “Nice post”.

Ophelia makes the point I was going to: that the weblog as a form isn’t necessarily political engaged, or scholarly, or anything else that would benefit from comments.

My current weblog is intended primarily for my personal reference, a written record of my experiences and thoughts during a transitional period of my life so that I can look back on it and see what I wrote then as opposed to what I remember writing (or thinking about writing). It’s already come in handy in tracking down some medical matters, too, including tracing the arc of a bout of depression and tying it together with factors I hadn’t considered before. I don’t mind hearing from readers about – there’s a mailto link on each post – but their experience and thoughts aren’t mine, and not my primary interest for this purpose.

Terry Teachout’s wonderful About Last Night comes to mind as another weblog that doesn’t strike me as diminished in its lack of comments. That’s true for a bunch of other cultural weblogs, too, where what I want to read is the personal account of someone who really knows what they’re talking about. It would not improve the experience to add a bunch of entirely predictable rants about the leftist evils of postmodernism, the rightist evils of monumental design, and so forth and so on. I like it when cultural bloggers do a response-to-mails post, but even there, they remain the ones in control and that’s just the way I like it.

Nor, for that matter, do I think that Juan Cole would have a better blog if he had comments. All the usual conservative ranters and other twits would swarm on on every post, thinking of themselves as “fact-checking his ass”, “resisting left-wing extremism”, and so on.

So I think that comments are an intrinsically neutral option, whose value depends on not only the size of the readership but the nature of the project, the social position of the blogger, and a bunch of other factors. And I strongly agree that insofar as democracy is a desirable characteristic in blogging, it exists in the blogosphere as a whole rather than being a required or even desirable element in every blog.

We live, in the US, in a democracy whose leaders travel secretly to and from their destinations in bullet-proof vehicles, surrounded by armed and trained men and women whose sole purpose is to throw their bodies between their charge and the line of fire.
Comments mean a lot to me, obviously, but they also mean a rounding-off, a hesitance on the controversial, and the avoidance of the inflammatory however true, or sincerely held to be so. I’m sure at least some of the CT demi-urges can confirm that.
I’ve gotten threatening mail from comments I’ve left. It’s not unthinkable that there would have been more, and worse, if it had been directed at a blog of my own.
Does anybody think it would be a good thing for riverbend to have comments? Good for her?
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Ophelia is as usual accurate as can be. But then books evolved for quite some time before they became those volumes we hold so dear. Blogs evolve, are evolving. Maybe reptilian with a stumpy tail right now…
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PZMyers-
“Low in the hierarchy” maybe on hit counts but that hierarchy’s only slightly less inverted than the Time/Newsweek pablum-clot. Anybody who gets linked to by Carl Zimmer is doing OK. And kudos for the commons.
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kit-
Exactly. And the timidity behind fixing in place what a “blog” is, when it’s only been a thing to fix for less than decade, seems premature to me too.
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chance –
Lots of yes. Caen and McCabe and Delaplane, and Art Hoppe for sure. And Royko. Breslin and Jon Carroll now. Lots of great regional journalist/columnists. The template.

I’m with Ophelia too, and like Andrew, I don’t like the word “democratic” used so improperly. Even if weblogs can be a million different things, the basic definition is rather simple, it is indeed any frequently updated personal page with links and commentary from the author(s), but no, it’s not like NYT because that’s a newspaper. Of course there is a big distinction. The difference is not just that a newspaper is printed, it’s that it is a traditional publication with a full editorial board, and a corporation, and all that it entails. It’s not personal. If anything, it’s newspapers that are expected to be more “inclusive”, they thrive on the amount of readers they reach for advertising purposes so it’s in their interests (financial too) to give the readers they kind of content they want. But they’re not expected to allow anyone to write on them either.

Weblogs are a personal endeavour, whether it’s one or ten authors, whether they write about politics or pop music or software or books or their own life in school, they’re doing it as a hobby. I’m not aware of anyone charging to read them. I don’t see why comments should be an integral part of them, it seems a limited view of what weblogs are about. It is entirely up to the authors and the kind of content they produce. Comments do make more sense for political web sites like this, but not necessarily for other kinds of topics. Still, you can always open your own site, comment and interact with another, linking and adding your opinions. That’s the openness of the whole thing, right there. Comments are an extra, they do not define the content, especially if it’s of a more personal than political nature.

q-
The scariest one was non-denominational, but my sense was it was triggered by my views on Israel’s role in the Iraqi debacle. I’ve had nice emails too, but the idea of having a blog with comments and wading through verbal anthrax to get to them is daunting. I’d rather get bounced from someone else’s blog than read death threats every day.
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Another thing about blogs in general and relating to mc’s distinction between them and the NYTimes is the parallel with the broadsheets that were the precursors for newspapers.
The gazettes and pamphlets, and all the other forms printed news and opinion took in the early days of public literacy.
There was a time when our information wasn’t centrally dispensed. Batches of a hundred on a hand-cranked press, and some unemployed actor crying the day’s headlines up and down Chutney Green.
Or the soap-box heroes of Hyde Park.
In a way blogs are a return to that. With an alchemy of unimaginable connectivity added on. And a constituency raised with a frustrated desire to be able to talk back at the television.

bruce writes:

“whose value depends on not only the size of the readership but the nature of the project, the social position of the blogger, and a bunch of other factors”

exactly. but as the number of commenters increases, it seems harder to establish favourable conditions, especially when discussing politics, an area where we tend to have strong opinions over and above knowledge or expertise about the topic at hand.

there is some similarity between class discussion and comments boards. in some classes, fewer questions and comments will encourage bad comments (relative the objectives of the course) because there is no previous standard set of comparison. this may seem like less of a problem for blogs because it’s easier to manage, but a couple of persistent idiots such as me when I’m less self conscious will discourage a more intelligent community composed of people who would otherwise bother.

sometimes it’s little things, like not bothering to proofread a comment which to others appears to be illiterate. i can’t explain it but it seems to be a good way to kill a thread unless a torrent of posts offsets negative psychological phenomena like that one.

from the perpective of a group of specialists, any blog community will be underinformed because average group composition in an open environment doesn’t select for expertise, even without comments, despite myriad interesting and intelligent thoughts, comments, ideas. every expert won’t be one elsewhere, and elsewhere seems to be a favorite direction on weblogs, so I don’t see this as much of a problem. I’m often amazed at the ideas of 30-80 of my fellow students which collectively are more useful than a professor who doesn’t encourage discussion, even if any one person isn’t even close in comparison.

volokh tends to post about his general area of expertise which also happens to be intimately connected with politics, so it’s easy to see how comments on his site would be a disaster (at least when internalizing his own interests), combined with the number of readers he gets (or even worse, “spilloff” from some of his co-conspirators thus skewing the average reader likely to comment in a really unpleasant direction)

and nevermind the trolls, some of us “prolific” commenters are just as bad, not only by contributing to a descending average, but encouraging similar comments to multiply, which is where I shut up :-)

Rowdy, open-ended comment sections, like Political Animal, will occasionally draw raw stuff like this, which makes the daily scrum worth wading through.

Perhaps we don’t know how this works yet.

The righties complaining about Drum’s comment sections are just attempting to translate the “playing the ref” tactics they use in big media to the blogosphere. Drum’s comment sections are just fine.

It is intimidating or frustrating to be 1 comment in a hundred; though as bad jim notes,you can get noticed.

I think you guys are getting it dead wrong when you try to define blogs.

There is no ‘proper’ blog format, there is no central control, that was the whole point to the Web. The first blog commentary systems appeared in 1993. Ever heard of Web Interactive Talk? Ari Luotenen wrote it to try out the CGI spec he just wrote with Rob. The term weblog did not appear until much, much later.

The only real distinguishing feature of Web-Logs is that they have a log structure, the information is organized in a linear fashion according to creation date. Early on in the Web design everyone was creating sites that sprouted out in every direction you could imagine. The point of a Web Log is that you can quickly work out whether the site is current or not.

I rarely read comments, unless it’s a post I find especially interesting, the thread is short (less than 20 posts), and it’s one of the few sites that has decent comment sections. So I can’t understand the idea that comments are a necessary feature of a blog.

I also hate the “right-wingers don’t have comments because they can’t handle the criticism!” idea. Given his prodigious reading, I highly doubt that Reynolds doesn’t encounter many posts on other blogs that criticize him every day, and I imagine an Instacomments section would be an even worse cesspool of degraded discourse than Drum or Atrios’s.

I leave comments more often than I read them (for example, I stopped reading this thread about a third of the way down). I find them useful for making short comments to the author — things that aren’t worth the trouble of logging into my email. For anything of more substance, I much prefer to put it on my own blog, so that I can have a record of my correspondence.

Comments reflect the tone and quality of the site. Cretinous blogs have cretinous comments. Intelligent, civil bloggers get intelligent, civil commentors. In that way, comments serve as a good check on a bloggers ego — if your commentors are obnoxious, you must be as well.

(There are a few exceptions. The Reason blog has posters that are much smarter than many of the commentors.)

Also, bloggers are responsible for their comments section. Putting up comments is like being a publisher — if you publish racist comments, even though you disagree with them, you’re responsible. You’re the one giving the bigots a forum in your personal web-space.

This poses practical difficulties for big bloggers, like Calpundit, who would have devote a crazy amount of time to moderate their enormous comments section. Boo hoo. If you want to run a big time blog, expect to devote a lot of time, or hire people to moderate the comments for you. Alternatively, shut down comments (and watch your site get less popular).

“Also, bloggers are responsible for their comments section. Putting up comments is like being a publisher — if you publish racist comments, even though you disagree with them, you’re responsible.”

One might counter with a similarly bare assertion:

“Bloggers are not responsible for their comments section. Putting up comments is like operating a telephone company — you’re not legally responsible for the contents of every message that passes through your system.”

A “common carrier” such as a telephone company enjoys that status in part because they exercise no editorial control over the users of their system. The tradition in the blogosphere at present is similar.

The more selective you are about what you delete, the less you implicitly state about what gets left behind.

If, like Charles Johnson, you delete posts that you find to be “offensive,” then you’re marking everything that remains as inoffensive.

If instead you delete only death threats, you’re merely marking everything that remains as “not a death threat.”

“and the general quality of the comments has defintely declined.”

I stopped going into the Calpundit comments for about three months, partly because they got too big and were intimidating; partly because of the “piling on” the house trolls (Al, Charlie) who are now viewed more affectionately as mischievous pets; partly because Kevin’s posts on AWOL(for example) didn’t leave room for much diverse comment (hint to bloggers here);partly because I was traveling elsewhere.

I have gone back to look at it, I will look for your complaints. I still see names at Kevin I see at Tacitus and ObsWi, so it can’t be all bad.

Will Baude will not read any comments, for it appears a single piece of vitriol or nonsense ruins his entire experience. Poor Will.

I think there’s little excuse to have a blog without either comments or trackback pings. I can understand turning off comments, as most of the popular blog software has pretty primitive technology compared to what has been available for a while in message boards. But that’s not an excuse for turning off trackback pings (speaking of which, how the hell do you trackback ping a post at this site? I see followup posts, but no trackback URL to ping).

But the main value-add of the Internet and blogs compared to other forms of media is that readers can immediately see contrasting views. I don’t really see this as a democracy issue as much as furthering knowledge. Most other forms of mass media have captive audiences (books, TV, academic journals) who have to jump through hoops to find alternate viewpoints to the one they are presented with. The Internet and blogosphere has the potential to transcend personal agendas and help accelerate the pursuit of knowledge and exploration of ideas. But I bet the biggest reason a big blog has neither is exactly the effect Matthew Yglesias pointed out:

The trouble is that when you write something really good, in the sense of being sober, on-point, factual, and tightly argued, your targets would do well to simply ignore you. And so they do.

The Internet and the blogosphere has the potential to raise the level of intellectual discussions such that ideas are valued not by who says them, but by their merit alone. This means the practicing of ignoring inconvenient arguments must be dissuaded as much as possible so that people can’t just glide by on reputation and relative unknowns with something worthwhile to contribute aren’t shut out and ignored.

So I think comments and/or trackback pings (especially inline ones instead of ones where you have to click to open a popup window) are essential to the Internet and blogosphere’s main value-add.