2010-06-16

On Comments

I agree with this post:
I don’t see my site as a community in which I need to enable internal discussion via comments.
Freedom of speech is not the same of guaranteed access to a particular audience. You have the right to speak; you do not have the right to compel me, or anyone else who happens to be my audience, to listen to it.

If you want your own platform for speaking, go to Blogger like I did and get yourself set up.

Further, Daring Fireball says:
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.
This is particularly interesting to me right now. I have four (erm...yeah, four) blogs going on Blogger right now. I've received perhaps five on-topic, relevant comments on my posts from authors other than myself. By contrast, most mornings I have to whack at least one chinese porno comment spam from at least one of the blogs.

Finally, I have a fundamental distrust of those who would hide behind pseudonyms. There are always exceptions, but somehow hiding behind a handle implies a bit of shame, either of the name, or of the content labelled with that name. I put my real name on my posts.

Altogether it isn't worth the effort, and I think I will be disabling comments.

There is still the problem of how to see who (if anyone) is actually linking to my posts; Google Analytics does a bit of it, but I find it a bit tedious to work through.