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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?

#61

Post by donatj »

Blogging without comments is weird to me. I have a small handful of blogs, one of which just turned 21 years old, and the reason I blog is the comments. I want to hear what others have to say. I want to know when I am wrong. I am not an unquestionable pillar of truth, I am a dude that finds things interesting and wants to talk about it. I want to learn more, and the collective peanut gallery inevitably knows more than I do.

My whole reason for doing it is a two way interaction. I think not enough people can just talk these days though, they get angry and mean about the silliest stuff. That leads to thinner skinned people just not willing to actually listen to anyone else, which is a shame. The most hate I ever got was a post about Go binary sizes of all things - literal personal attacks. Like I just wanted to have a conversation about compilers and people were insulting my mental abilities.

So basically on the one hand can understand why people would not have comments, but on the other hand I have no idea why you would blog at all without them aside from ego.

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

#62

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

We've had several clients ask us to disable their blog comments in the last 3 or so years and the reason was always moderation. Even when the comments generate good conversation or produce something of value SEO or community wise, it's not worth the effort to weed out the bad comments and conversation you don't want happening on the blog.

For our clients, it was almost always turning into a political discussion. Even on posts talking about something as innocuous as an event that was held for the company's employees, people would turn up and start talking about something political and it would eventually devolve into threats and dox attempts. It just wasn't worth the moderation effort anymore.

Spam can be blocked automatically by tools fairly easy but actual conversations unrelated to the topic at hand required too much work. And in one case, threats led to police involvement and that was more than the client was willing to deal with.

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

#63

Post by pSYoniK »

I think the idea of the participatory web came at a time when people who were participating in the web were a lot kinder and a lot more curios and open about the web in general. I remember being able to scroll through a few forums on which I spent time and being able to engage in conversations with complete strangers with relative ease (late 90s early 00s). At this point, even a somewhat harmless comment on here can result in abuse very quickly or in a swift escalation towards uncivilized behavior. It's still vastly better to a lot of the other arenas of discussion though.

Which says firstly something about the quality of the discourse that can occur within the comments section and the tone of these comments.

Comments have also devolved into a collection of memes and one-liners that don't add anything to the discussion in the best case scenario. At worst, they lead to my previous point. As gregdoesit said in the top comment, a lot of comments have evolved into straight up spam and, similarly, on my blog, I added my contact email address if someone wants to follow up or inquire about anything I post there.

So I think that the participatory internet is dead to some extent. I never got this "comment on a news article" thing either. If a bomb goes off and tragically kills 5 people your "thoughts and prayers + praying-emoji" doesn't add anything. Commenting "fake news" also doesn't add anything. A team losing a game 2-0 or 38-0 also doesn't need a comment section "no, they didn't!".

What I think I'm trying to say is that there is little to be gained, it ads additional maintenance overhead and it can also become toxic very quickly. An older page I had use to provide comments but most of my time was deleting the 10-15 comments posted every day by bots.

Also, the irony of me posting a comment about being anti-comment isn't lost on me.

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

#64

Post by marginalia_nu »

rasen58 wrote: post #59
marginalia_nu wrote: post #39

Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets. Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior. If you have something substantive to say,…

Why doesn’t HN have botspam then?

Larger forums like HN and Reddit have the economies of scale on their side. They have a lot more time and money to throw on solving the problem than a blogger or someone who runs a phpBB-forum as a hobby.

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

#65

Post by Wowfunhappy »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #39

Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets. Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior. If you have something substantive to say,…

How do you use comment fields for a botnet?

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

#66

Post by TuringTest »

tjansen wrote: post #46
gregdoesit wrote: post #5

I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics. I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add. Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the co…

Maybe that's an idea for a product: find discussions on HN, Twitter, Reddit, FB etc about your blog post and embed them on the blog where you would usually see the comments. Not sure how big the market is, but...

> Not sure how big the market is, but...

Probably, good enough for a Wordpress plugin.

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

#67

Post by muzani »

rasen58 wrote: post #59
marginalia_nu wrote: post #39

Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets. Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior. If you have something substantive to say,…

Why doesn’t HN have botspam then?

Traffic + downvotes. A blog may have downvotes but not the human traffic to utilize them

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

#68

Post by turoczy »

gregdoesit wrote: post #5

I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics. I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add. Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the co…

I've been blogging in some form or another since the late 90s, but consistently on the same blog for going on 15 years.

Like many here, I turned off commenting years ago. My motivation had less to do with spam. (I'm on WordPress and it does a pretty good job with that.) It had more to do with the conversations moving from my site to the social web. Folks wanted to talk about stuff where they already were, rather than centralizing that conversation on individual blogs.

(As an aside, I rarely participated in those comment threads on my blog. I always saw them as a place for others to talk about a post. I'd already had my chance to say my piece. So the comments had less value to me, personally, but seemed to have value to the folks reading my blog. All to say that I wasn't really driving engagement with the comments. I was just letting them do what they were doing.)

I tried a few of those "commenting" solutions that attempted to pull the social channels into the blog itself, but they never seemed to recreate that 2005-2010 dynamic of active and engaging conversations occurring on a single post.

It's also worth noting that, in my experience, a big motivator for many platforms had to do with driving pageviews. And once commenting stopped doing that, folks seemed to lose interest in continuing to offer that functionality.

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

#69

Post by jimhefferon »

I see a lot of people saying why not to have comments, and they are all fair things to say. But in counterpoint I'll say that sometimes I send a technical correction, or other such friendly remark, that I think the blogger gains by.

But of course I agree that the great majority of comments that you see are very discouraging.

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

#70

Post by carlbordum »

eqvinox wrote: post #27

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.

Shameless plug: I built Cactus Comments (https://cactus.chat/).

It's an open-source comment system federated on the Matrix (https://matrix.org/) network. This means you can use your Matrix identity to comment on any site that uses Cactus, without the tracking of something like disqus. Works well with static site generators too.

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