Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system

> "If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there."

This is actually the common mode of conversation in one area of the academic blogosphere I follow, and it's annoying as hell. I would definitely not want it to become a common model.

Instead of centralizing a discussion in comments somewhere, I have to follow a web of "Just writing a quick note in reply to Michael here" and trackbacks and whatnot amongst 5-8 blogs that usually participate in the conversation. If you're not following it in real-time, it's especially annoying to try to reconstruct the conversation, versus if it were in one blog's comments, or a web forum somewhere, or on a mailing list, or anything else other than 5-8 people with separate blogs replying to each other on their own blogs. In this case, though, it's less due to blog authors not wanting comments (most have them on), and more due to the repliers always thinking their reply is so important that it has to be kicked up to a reply-post, rather than living as a mere blog comment.

I do like the "blogs are publishing" analogy he uses, but for negative reasons: instead of people conversing directly, this model of "reply on your own blog" results in the equivalent of everyone printing up broadsides or pamphlets with their ideas. So you print your pamphlet, and if someone disagrees, they print their own, and instead of 5 people discussing things, you have 5 pamphleteers scattering their dueling pamphlets around town.

Nonetheless, the old model of publishing documents on the web seems fine, but I don't see why it should be in blog format then. If you have a document that's worth "publishing", imo it should usually be of somewhat lasting interest, and you should pick a format other than reverse-chronological-order to organize your published documents (though it's fine to have a "recent documents" list to direct frequent readers to what's new).

That makes some sense to me, and I think I'm somewhat more negative on 3rd-party comment sites than on bloggers' own sites as well. On a blogger's site, it feels like I'm writing a reply to the blogger, which I make more effort to try to keep constructive, soften negative points, make sure to balance them with positive ones, etc. On a 3rd-party site it feels like I'm writing a comment for the site's own community, not really directed at the author, who often isn't present (e.g. I doubt NYTimes journalists are here reading our comments on their articles).

The fact that they are sometimes present makes that a little tricky, and maybe requires recalibration. Traditionally, I was able to assume that an author of an external blog post wasn't part of the community, because if they were, they would've just posted their post in the community instead. For example, in the heydey of Kuro5hin, if you were part of the community, you most often subumitted your articles to K5. If something was linked externally instead of published on K5, you could assume it probably wasn't by a community member. Same on Usenet--- if you were writing an article as part of a community, you posted it to the community. And I think it does make sense for discussions to have a different tone when the author is present and engaging versus when they aren't.

It's a separate (though related) issue, but I think there are real advantages to that kind of community-centric site, where the discussion and the articles make up the community, instead of the HN-style collection of on-site discussion and off-site blog posts, some of which are by community members and some of which aren't (with no easy way of distinguishing, unless you remember which URLs are blogs of HN members).

The "blog post as direct response" model works really well on Tumblr.

Everywhere else it only works at the extreme ends — for total takedowns like the recent Kurzweil/Myers dustup and friendly 'Sue's post on x inspired me to post this on y', but not anything in between. Trackbacks were the worst thing to come out of SixApart, and those guys were chock full of bad ideas. Basically tailor-made for spam.

That's a beautiful analogy.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting real-world analogue when he has to deal with q&a during his public speaking event. He believes that people are behaving in status-seeking ways and so forces people who want to ask questions to write them down and pass them up where he answers them anonymously[1]. Winer's 24-hour limit seems to be partially addressing this problem as well, but I agree with the comments already posted about that being too much time to care.

One possible solution I'm thinking about implementing in a new blog I'm starting is a separate Twitter comments account. This forces brevity and accountability among other things, and people could link to their own posts or places where my posts are (hopefully) being discussed. In addition, if the blog is successful, I could potentially see what comments are being retweeted, etc. and run some quick and dirty analytics to help determine high-value comments. Additional benefits would be connecting with high-value readers in a more intimate way that could improve dialogue as well as gently guide users to providing comments via email for longer dialogues. I'm concerned that 140 characters is too short to provide feedback, though the majority of comments I post on non-conversational sites seem to fit into that range.

Any thoughts?

[1] Sorry, I can't find a link to the article so I'm paraphrasing heavily.