Blog Comments Are Not Social Media
Matthias Ott, riffing on a conversation between Matt Mullenweg (of whom, of course, I’ve heard) and Tim Ferriss (who seems precisely like the sort of ridiculous Silicon Valley influencer type about whom I’m glad I’ve never heard anything), has some thoughts about blog comments. As someone who’s only just this week activated them for the first time in (hazarding a guess) at least a decade, I’ve thoughts of my own.
That was when Tim shared something he had noticed: that the discussions that used to happen in comments, have, for the most part, moved over to social media. Which is definitely something I noticed, too. So many blogs – even some big names – either have empty or neglected comment sections these days, or even none at all.
I’ll go this one further: in the era of social media, whether or not my blogs had comments turned on, basically no one ever really talked in either place about anything I blogged. I don’t think social media simply replaced blog comments in terms of discussion of blog posts. I think in turning everyone into microbloggers themselves, people mostly stopped talking about blog posts at all unless they were by A-listers, most of whom also amassed large social media followings.
If memory serves, my own Twitter following topped out at around 2,500 or so people and brands. On the one hand, this likely is larger than any blog readership I ever had, but on the other hand few of them were discussing my blog posts.
At any rate, the question Matthias poses is, “How could one create the best comment section on the internet?” and setting aside whether or not that should be the goal of anyone engaged in what’s effectively personal blogging, as opposed to brand of influencer blogging, I disagree with at least two of the specific answers Matthias offers.
Feel very chat-like
This, to me, is a sad knock-on effect of the rise of messaging and chat clients, whether we’re talking basic SMS/MMS or Slack and Discord: some people think everything should be chat. As someone who made his chat bones on IRC in the 90s, I very much do not want chat-style commenting. If I had any commenters, would I want them to be getting into the post at hand both with me and with each other? Of course. Do I want it to feel “chat-like”? An entire and large, Jupiter-sized even, world of no.
Maybe I’m showing my age here, but blog comments for me were not places to hang out.
The instigating event is the blog post itself, and the best comment sections were discussions, not chats. The comments on Portland Communique would have been effectively nonsense if people had just used them as a place to hang out. Even when I left that stand-alone journalism behind, my personal blog had comments sections where people really engaged with the matter at hand. That’s just not a chat thing.
Allow people to give feedback on comments
He’s talking here about things like likes and dislikes, upvoting and downvoting, and just raising this idea gives me nightmares. As I mentioned recently, I’m having some trouble with the display of webmentions because I’m just not sure whether or not I want to display likes. I’m glad to receive them and take note of them, but when it comes to the posts themselves what I want to acknowledge and display publicly on posts is discussion.
The last thing I want is commenters jockeying to generate the noise of likes, dislikes, and votes on each other’s comments.
If there’s something you don’t like about a comment, then make of that a comment of your own. For real: when I think about blogs having this sort of system in place for comments, it feels like an influencer-driven need to transfer some of the competitive dopamine contest of social media over into what you hope is your blog commenting community. It feels more to me like trying to game your blog into keeping people chasing the rush.
Three years ago, when favorably reviewing Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, it turns out I said something that generally sums up how I feel here.
I’ve expressed the changes in our internet experience as a move from interaction to indication, from expression to excitation. “Social media on mobile,” writes McNeil, “had a different tempo and friction as users documented in the moment, rather than retrospectively.” (Note: I’ve written often about friction here.) Mostly, how we began to behave on mobile became how we behaved on other devices, as well, because it’s how the new crop of sites to which we all gravitated were designed to be used.
There’s nothing I’d like less than looking up one day to find the comments section of my blog was catering to the worst of what we’ve been doing on social media for the past decade and a half. Very little about what happened in social media belongs in the comments of your average, personal blog. Comments sections on most blogs should slow things down, not speed them up.
You want investment, not gamification. You want some sense of community, not competition. You want interaction, not mere indication. You want expression, not mere excitation. You want retrospection, not mere reaction.