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Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

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Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#21

Post by shortformblog »

I shut them off on Tedium for three reasons:

1) They were difficult to manage. You never know when someone is going to spam you or take a swipe at you. And if a post goes viral, you’re basically inviting both of those things.

2) Disqus, the primary comment system I used, had advertising that you had to pay for to remove, and I was going in a different direction with my ad strategy at the time. (Also, even if I was OK with running ads like that, they were no longer worth the price of admission. There was a time back when I ran my old site, ShortFormBlog, where Disqus ads brought in a couple of hundred bucks a month. No longer.)

3) There are many other venues for people to offer their take on a piece; why limit them?

I think Boing Boing’s approach of replacing comments with a forum struck a good balance.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#24

Post by giantrobot »

Hosting comments on a blog has a non-zero cost. There's infrastructure required to support them, security concerns, and then content concerns. For all the potential costs there is vanishingly little utility in self-hosted comments.

A comment section on a blog only makes sense in the world of spherical cows and friction-less pulleys. The vision is a blog post will start a conversation with readers. The reality is that spammers and trolls will necessitate moderation that will quickly eat the time a blog author might spend having conversations.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#25

Post by 21723 »

Blogs themselves seem to be on the way out. I hate that this is the case, but it's true.

The first problem is the asymmetry between downside (substantial) and upside (very little). We don't live in the world we had in 2004. Authoritarian governments and employers (which are basically authoritarian private governments) will find what you say and it will only be used against you. Text's strength and downfall is that it's so easy to index. Any two-bit Spreadsheet Eichmann looking to fire you can do a Google search on you and find something you said 10 years ago.

Podcasts and video essays are taking over. Now, for someone to find something to use against you, he at least has to listen to content--that doesn't scale. (This may change due to widespread adoption of more advanced "AI" algorithms. I'm sure they're already being deployed by authoritarian states.) Of course, these have much higher barriers to entry, which means there's less diversity of voice and more of an emphasis on marketability... but there's still a lot of great content being produced (e.g. breadtube).

Blogs were fun, but their time is over due to the increasing necessity of paranoia to survive. People used to write under their real names. That's unthinkable now, because it's so easy these days for employers and ill-intended governments to find causes to harm people.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#26

Post by username223 »

I've been writing a non-tech-related Wordpress blog for 12 years, with comments turned on the whole time. Akismet automatically filters out almost all spam, and pre-approval for first-time commenters catches the rest. I find the comments usually positive, sometimes helpful, and never abusive. I can only conclude that some threshold of popularity, and subjects (like politics and maybe tech) that draw the wrong kinds of people, turn comments into cesspools. Since I'm not blogging for money or fame, or about rage-inducing topics, I'm fine.

To me, blogging without comments would feel like being that guy at a party who drones on endlessly about his own pet obsession, oblivious to the fact that his "listeners" are bored or want to add something.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#27

Post by eqvinox »

The problem isn't having comments on your blog, it's having locally scoped identities to comment on your blog. It essentially removes all cost for "destructive" participation, whether it be spam, harassment or other trolling.

This is solved either by moving commenting entirely off-site to a larger network, or by using identities from a larger scope.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#28

Post by rubyfan »

Yes they are a thing of the past. Whenever I run into them I smile for nostalgia and inevitably run into examples of why they are a thing of the past…

1. low utilization among real readers

2. high abuse by spammers

3. the few hold out site that keep comments on articles are politicized garbage of very little real value and make me wonder why I continue to visit their site at all, e.g. slashdot

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#30

Post by tomatowurst »

rubyfan wrote: post #28

Yes they are a thing of the past. Whenever I run into them I smile for nostalgia and inevitably run into examples of why they are a thing of the past… 1. low utilization among real readers 2. high abuse by spammers 3. the few hold out site that keep comments on articles are politicized garbage of very little real value and make me wonder why I continue to visit their site at all, e.g. slashdot

also forums were notorious for this, there was a program called xRumer or something that used to mass spam, solve captchas on blogs, forums to engage in short term SERP boosts and sell viagras.
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