September 25, 2007

Some Comments on Comments

Several readers have asked why, in the recent redesign of this site, I dropped comment functionality from weblog articles. Here's why.

The weblogs I love share two elements:

• An expert author with a strong voice
• A focus on a single broad topic of deep interest to me

When the author is especially gifted, I will forgive a wandering focus, but in general I'm reading to learn what the author is thinking about that single broad topic.

Note the lack of comments (or "community") from my two-item list. I stopped reading blog comments long ago, recognizing, in confirmation of Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of all comments are crap. There are many varieties of crap—off-topic, self-serving, ass-kissing, uninformed, superficial, showboating, belligerent, and of course, just plain dull—but the result is the same.

Of course, 90% is not 100%, which is say that some comments are not crap at all, and that some—one percent?—are truly thought-provoking. Unfortunately the better comments don't come with little flags indicating their higher quality, so the entire endeavor remains too much of a crap shoot (pun intended) to tempt me.

Now, several folks in the web development have recently weighed in on the subject of blog comments—pro, con, and ambivalent. These include John Gruber (via Shawn Blanc), Joel Spolsky, Andy Rutledge, Roger Johansson, and Eric Meyer. I won't summarize their arguments here except to say that Guber perfectly captures my thinking during the recent redesign of this site:

[The] reader I write for is a second version of me. I'm writing for him. He's interested in the exact same things I'm interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he's read it all.

This idea of a second me is more than a little frightening, but like John, I'm focused on a single reader: myself, essentially. He's a tough audience, sharp and skeptical, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

And at the risk of proposing an ontological impossibility (and of contradicting the point of this article), I would love to hear from him. Or her. Or whomever. That's what my contact page is for. Comment functionality, though, is gone, likely forever, may it rest in pixelated peace.

Published in Content, Luminous, WWW