Comments on: Comments on Blogs: Left vs. Right

By: Cassandra

Cassandra — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 15:53:20 +0000

I agree with the point about high traffic and open comments being incompatible.

What makes comments enjoyable is having (hopefully) an intelligent readership who know each other so one can maintain some element of decorum.

I don't get huge amounts of traffic - 1100 visits a day at the height of the election madness over at JetNoise and I'm down to more like 300-350 now that I just started VC and no one knows where I am :)

But I have a comment-heavy blog and even with no traffic, I've been amazed how one troll can totally disrupt a conversation. And unfortunately, I've noticed that for whatever reason, whenever I link to a post on a liberal site, I get pummeled by people who come over and post ugly notes about "how many Iraqi babies did your husband kill today?" Not exactly the best ambassadors for the Left side of the blogosphere, especially as we've had (and welcomed) spirited and intelligent debate with even antagonistic commenters from the liberal side.

With large numbers comes an increased likelihood of the fringe element showing up - it becomes less worth it to have comments turned on.

By: PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science

PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:59:51 +0000

Comment-ary
I managed to miss the Big Blog Comment Debate today, but thankfully James Joyner summarized it for me.

Apparently Kevin Drum (yes, again) finds it "mock worthy" that conservative blogs who like to talk about the self-corrected nature of the Blogos...

By: bryan

bryan — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 22:04:58 +0000

I'm sure the folks at Google really love all the bandwidth Atrios is sucking out of them for nothing.

But I don't recall Reynolds ever having comments enabled. I do know that he at least looks at his e-mail, which serves the same purpose and keeps out the obvious intra-comment back-biting that can occur.

Honestly, this is another one of those "blogs v. journalism" topics that seems to arise every so often when someone doesn't have anything else to write about.

By: OJ

OJ — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 21:30:22 +0000

I am not sure if trackbacks are important or not - we don't use them.
Our comment section does get some 'trollage' but if it were all back-slapping, 'yea you are right' it would get stale and boring pretty quickly.

http://www.RightViews.com

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:52:19 +0000

I don't see trackbacks as particularly important at all. In fact, I've had to shut mine down as I've been getting hammered by tb spam. If somebody links to me and writes further Technorati will generally pick it up within a couple of days. I'm curious about who links to me, but I'm certainly not obsessive enough about it to endure the spam. I leave comments open for 7 days - which is usually enough time for the conversation to start and stop naturally without getting found by the spambots. I don't use site meter so Ecosystem does not pick up my traffic numbers, but I too am a rodent in the Ecosystem.

By: JMOORE

JMOORE — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:21:36 +0000

I reject the argument that "they are hard to maintain" or that it could be too costly. Funding is actually pretty easy to come by(see Google Adsense). It seems as though a direct correlation would occur between traffic, number of comments, and ad funds. When one goes up, they all go up.

More at http://www.jurispundit.com

By: John

John — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:17:37 +0000

While I have open comments, I also have to spend time deleting the 200-or-so pieces of comment spam that make it through my filters daily. I'm certainly not in the top-ten (in fact, recently demoted from "large mammal" to "rodent"), but keeping the comments clean is more work than I really want to be doing.

By: King of Fools

King of Fools — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:44:35 +0000

Agreed. Trackback is far more important than comments.

By: Todd Pearson

Todd Pearson — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:43:46 +0000

Glenn and the Powerline guys get plenty of comments; they just aren't accessible by everyone. The comments come by email, and I am sure that that email is full of "corrections."

By: Bithead

Bithead — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:26:42 +0000

I daresay Reynolds for example, figures it this way; He has neither the time, nor the inclination to keep the fruitbats in line as to content. A look at the DU will give a fair enough idea what becomes the site once comments are opened.

And of course the bandwidth is an issue.

And your comment that cross-blog threads are part of the self-correctives is spot on. Of course if they acknowledge this, their arugment is totally shot.

By: Arguing with signposts... » When we don’t have anything else to talk about ..

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

[...] le complaining about the lack of comments on some “right” bloggers (and others pointing out the flawed methodology of such broad generalizations). Others note the hostility tow [...]

By: PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science » Comment-ary

PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science » Comment-ary — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

[...] ven Taylor @ 8:52 pm
I managed to miss the Big Blog Comment Debate today, but thankfully James Joyner summarized it for me. Apparently Kevin Drum (yes, again) finds it “mock worthy [...]