Marklr.

parislemon:

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

I love this. My view on comments has certainly changed over the years. I feel like I used to be suspicious of any site that didn’t have them. But now I don’t have them on this very site. 

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse. 

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

And yes, I’ve tried all the various third-party commenting platforms. Some work really well. But the fundamental problem remains that most people on the Internet are idiots — especially when they can be anonymous in some way.

Plus, comments tend to make sites look ugly.

I agree with everything MG and Gruber say, but what gets me about comments is the inherent anti-user bias they present.

There’s been an increasing trend over the past couple of years for content creators to “control” the conversation using various tools; there’s the social media pieces of flair that scrape all the social media sites to find every mention of a blog post (as a way to tell everyone, “look at me! I’m relevant!”, I guess), the URL shortening analytics and toolbars (like Owl.ly, the defunct BurnURL, and the soon-to-be defunct DiggBar), and most heinous of all, the tools that scrape comments on social media sites and repost them, without proper attribution or privacy considerations, on people’s sites (like UberVU).

All of this is part of a utopian fantasy of some so-called “global conversation”. Even if it existed, I don’t want to be a part of it: I don’t want to be pushed into a larger, global, monolithic conversation with strangers I don’t care about (and don’t care about me). I just want to have a conversation about a piece of content with my social circle. And behavioral patterns on social networks show this sentiment over and over again. The average person does not want to be part of a global conversation, so let’s all stop trying to force people into it already.

So, if I find it annoying, and I believe most people find it annoying, I’d rather not subject my readers to it if I can help it. You want to have a conversation about what I’m writing? More power to you, talk about it wherever you want with whomever you want. If disabling comments helps in some small part to relieve the obligation to join one singular conversation, I feel I did a service.

Of course, I say that as the current incarnation of marktrapp.com has comments enabled. I should get around to removing them.