i’ve commented before on my ruminations as to
whether or not i should enable comments on the
vast wasteland
and i think
nick denton
hits the nail on the head with
“comments and communities”
:
“Nope, this is the way to deal with flamers: let them
post on their own damn sites. And then let everyone else ignore
them. Weblogs are a gigantic interlinked discussion forum, in which
it’s trivially easy to route around idiots.One day, everybody will have a weblog, and a place to comment, and
indexing systems will track the discussion as it reverberates
around the web.”
proof i think is in the pudding of
mark pilgrim’s
“Further reading on today’s posts” feature. the generally
high-quality of the comments indexed from other sites provides a
much higher signal-to-noise ratio than traditional commenting
systems.
i guess some of my skittishness comes from the very brief period in
which i enabled comments on the
photo gallery
. it took exactly one hour before clever readers starting leaving
spam comments. and while photos of dogs may seem like an open
invite for inane comments, in the words of nick, “…let them post
on their own damn sites.”