This I have not seen this since I visited Steve Pavlina’s blog way back in the day.
A blog with comments disabled.
Steve, with possibly one of the most read blogs ever, decided post comments weren’t for him.
Well below 1% of visitors ever post a comment, yet this is the voice that seems the loudest, even though it may be unrepresentative of the whole.
Each to their own of course. Comments have only very recently become a feature at disassociated.com something helped rather by my recent decision to migrate my blog to Wordpress.
Steve felt very few people left comments, and even fewer people read them, so he pulled the plug on them at his place. Once again, his blog, his prerogative.
I was therefore interested when I read that the blogger known as Kumiko recently disabled comments on her blog, as an experiment, for a week .
Some of her findings make for some interesting reading though.
She felt her RSS subscribers increased, as did incoming links, as did search engine traffic, and productivity, to list a few of the pros.
Increasing incoming links, hey? If people can’t leave a comment about a post on your blog, perhaps they will consider writing a post on their blog about the post they wanted to comment on.
Now there’s a backlink building idea for you…
On the downside though, she apparently had to deal with a few abusive emails, a decrease in pageviews, and a dwindling sense of community.
Her comments about the decreasing sense of community piqued my interest though.
Without comments, there is definitely a decrease in the community feeling of the site. However, I believe that a blog isn’t a community in the first place.
Well that may be true, but it always seemed to me blogs collectively formed a community. Or some sort of community that is.
But then again the absence of a commenting feature doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of the ability to build community.
Back in the late 90’s, before the word blog even existed, there were online journals.
Through mine, I came into contact with people, some right here in Sydney, such as Jen Leheny, Justin Fox, Andrew Johnstone, and Jade Palmer, to name but a few (I can’t find the latter day inceptions of the other late 90’s online journal writer’s blogs, so sorry if I left you out…).
Without a comment box in sight, we managed to establish a community via email, and later face-to-face gatherings, the result of which was the creation of the Australian INfront, a massive community of Australian web designers and developers.
So, yes, the comment that “a blog isn’t a community” is probably valid, but two, or more, blogs can be the beginning of a community.
Personally though I like comments, here at least, so they won’t be going any where just at the moment.
I think if your website is more about sending out _information_ then comments might not be needed; those sites might benefit more from a forum type environment. But for more personal/informal blogs comments are a great environment.
You know, I’ve been thinking about the comments issue for a while myself. I’m very intrigued by the results of those experiments and the quotes. I’m always so frustrated because I KNOW how many people visit my site, and how many regular readers I have, yet in my case well under 1% post a comment. I always feel this makes my blog(s) look unread, even though two blogs I write for are very well-trafficked. Are blogs a community? Well, that was one premise on which we started WebUrbanist, and yet only the heavily social-media-voted posts get enough comments to start anything like a conversation. So, if I keep this up my comment will end up as long as your post, but I will say: I will try it on at least one of my blogs and see what happens.
@Bryce - I guess it depends on the sort of information a blog features. I’ve seen some great informational posts supplemented by some great comments. But you’re right, forums, especially on high traffic, high discussion, sites are the way to go :)
@Derami - personally I think it’s a given that the “comment count” on most blogs will be relatively low. While many comments tend to effectively be “thanks for writing this”, which is fine, I think in a lot of cases only a small number of posts will generate in-depth discussion or conversation.
I don’t know, but a blog without a comment facility seems a little… naked!?
I don’t understand the thought behind disabling comments - why write in the first place? It smacks of ‘written in stone’ syndrome - ‘I write, therefore I am’.
Of course blogs come in many different categories but even business needs feedback and encouragement.
Surely comments are an invaluable method of attracting interest to your own blog…what am I saying? I’ve been rumbled! :)
Steve has since started a forum. So that will build him a community.
There are also plenty of blogs (such as Wonkette) with limited number of authorized “commenters” and it may be hard to get in. This is essentially the same as disabling comments and allowing what amounts to second-tier authors to “contribute” in the comments area.
@John: true for most blogs, yes. A lot of really good and popular blogs (like mine, hehe) have a low comment count. Still, there is something about those sites like TechCrunch where every post gets a zillion comments that makes me feel a little exposed with just a few comments on most posts (even though there are a lot on ones that make the front pages of social news sites, etc…). I guess I just wish that for new readers there were always a lot of comments showing on the first post they see - which is why we added a ‘Guest Book’ page to WebUrbanist
To follow-up on monkey’s post…Steve Pavlina’s forum is quite the active community. It seems like most of the blogs or forums dedicated to blogs that are really high-volume comment have one thing in common: The blogger is willing to send the time to carry on a conversation and get involved in the community.
@WalksFarWoman - True; if you’re going to have a blog, in the strict sense of the word, then comments are really part of the deal. If someone wants to write articles, but without the commentary, maybe the idea would be to publish in another format, like maybe an e-zine?
@monkey and banana @Zen Zoomie - well a forum has to be one of the best community building mechanisms there is. I didn’t realise Steve had one! I had somehow also gained the impression from his thoughts on comments that he would have to spend a lot of time moderating them. A forum would be even more time intensive in that respect! :)
@Kurt - well yes the number of comments must be some indication of a blog’s overall popularity I guess. As your blog’s readership grows hopefully so will the comments you receive :) Actually guests books were probably the fore runner of post comments, and maybe even discussion forums… !
I think sometimes bloggers find it hard to leave a comment that isn’t just “I agree” or “Me too”. Those types of comments have become so frowned upon out there in the blogosphere, and I can’t work out why. Wouldn’t we rather have *a* comment, little as it might be, vs no comment?
I’m a crazy serial commenter though, so I’m biased on this issue. I tend to comment on somewhere between 20-50 blogs a day.. and sometimes all I want to say is “I agree” but I never feel like that’s ok.. so I say more than I needed to!
Snoskred - has a new home at -
http://www.snoskred.org/
Comments are a good thing. So are links. I followed an allsux link here, so community IS da thing.
@Snoskred - you’re one busy commenter! In a way I could see the “I agree” or “Me too” comments as an acknowledgment I’ve read a post, and maybe as a quick thanks for writing it.
On the subject of “doing it easy” I’ve even had message me via comments because it’s easier than sending an email! If I had no comments I could be missing those sorts of messages!
@Dan - links and community - well now there’s another topic all together! I may have to take that one on soon-ish :)