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Comment by WiseWeasel | Hacker News Reader

Meh, 24 hours is too long to wait. By that time, I likely no longer care to read any comments on the subject, so they all go unread. I mean who is going to return to a blog post a day later just so they can read comments? Might as well just leave the comments off. Let's face it, the author is still working through his trauma from a time when he apparently left comments unmoderated and unrestricted and got burned, and this is his therapy. He's making his way back into the social, but he's taking baby steps.

Also, when you're boasting of feats like inventing blog comments, you might be slightly more prone to being trolled than your average blogger.

View on HN

I feel that comments on blogs themselves are slowly being replaced by comments on sites such as HN, Reddit, etc. I notice again and again, at least with personal blogs, that a post with 90 comments on HN will only have two or three comments on the post on the original site. Additionally the posts on HN are more likely to be negative than the posts on the original site.

Perhaps it is because people feel less inhibited when they are posting their thoughts in another neutral space. If the author of the article doesn't want to be trolled or flamed on his own site then why not just link to the HN discussion, as I have seen other bloggers do?

If your post is controversial or interesting people will discuss it, and you can do nothing to stop it, because closing comments on the main site will just cause people to discuss it on another site, as this HN post is proving.

I've done more or less what you suggest, I have comments 'off' on my blog but do follow the comments on the HN threads. I used to post whatever I had to say as a 'link less post' but people were complaining about reading light gray on dark gray.

I think that those that disagree with you are your best teachers though, what would you rather have, a hundred people going 'yes' or 3 that disagree with you and get a conversation going?

"Additionally the posts on HN are more likely to be negative"

What exactly do you mean? That people do not comment on here, ohh this is brilliant, we love you, you're our god, even if the guy said something obvious or something which isn't brilliant at all, or do you mean that here people write down their thoughts as they are not biased. I do not see why the latter would necessarily mean negative however? There are criticisms, but are reasonable criticisms something negative?

I think posts here are positive, even for the owner of the site, unless he takes it personally. You know, its just business :P

I am just referring to a general trend that I have noticed in submitted articles, after comparing HN comments with on-site comments for the past year or so.

On HN you are more likely to see nitpicks or deconstructions of the article, even criticisms of the person who wrote the article. Also the best way to get upvotes is often to criticize the article submitted and point out a flaw.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing... I'm just sharing my observations.

That makes some sense to me, and I think I'm somewhat more negative on 3rd-party comment sites than on bloggers' own sites as well. On a blogger's site, it feels like I'm writing a reply to the blogger, which I make more effort to try to keep constructive, soften negative points, make sure to balance them with positive ones, etc. On a 3rd-party site it feels like I'm writing a comment for the site's own community, not really directed at the author, who often isn't present (e.g. I doubt NYTimes journalists are here reading our comments on their articles).

The fact that they are sometimes present makes that a little tricky, and maybe requires recalibration. Traditionally, I was able to assume that an author of an external blog post wasn't part of the community, because if they were, they would've just posted their post in the community instead. For example, in the heydey of Kuro5hin, if you were part of the community, you most often subumitted your articles to K5. If something was linked externally instead of published on K5, you could assume it probably wasn't by a community member. Same on Usenet--- if you were writing an article as part of a community, you posted it to the community. And I think it does make sense for discussions to have a different tone when the author is present and engaging versus when they aren't.

It's a separate (though related) issue, but I think there are real advantages to that kind of community-centric site, where the discussion and the articles make up the community, instead of the HN-style collection of on-site discussion and off-site blog posts, some of which are by community members and some of which aren't (with no easy way of distinguishing, unless you remember which URLs are blogs of HN members).

I think he means "the posts on HN are more likely to be _critical_"

I'm not sure why someone who posts a comment would have to return 24 hours later to sniff their own droppings in order for the comment to have value. (I'm responding to "Might as well just leave the comments off" here). That perspective might make sense if 100% of a blog entry's audience arrives within its first day, but I would wager that the bulk of any blog entry's audience are lurkers who arrive later.

If that's truly the case, then it feels like it would be rewarding the lurkers and penalizing the loyal readers, as the lurkers would get a much faster effective response rate.

But by far the worst offense to me is that it kills the community aspect, elevating the words and whims of the blogger much too high above the rabble's hobbled forum; they should consider themselves lucky to have been tossed these few scraps. Who wants to invest their time contributing to such a stodgy environment?

I agree with respect to the proposed stodgy environment, but I find it strange to suggest that lurkers are, a priori, somehow less loyal than chatterboxes. To me loyalty and a willingness to post are orthogonal to each other, for the most loyal reader I can imagine is someone who comes every day to check for something new and expects nothing out of the exchange beyond what they read, and one can also easily imagine drive-by commenters who never return again, or - worse still - those who persist and actively drag down the forums in myriad ways.

I wonder what it is about the web that makes people forget and/or denigrate the silent majority. It seems to be something unique about the web, mind you, because no one would imagine that the handful of cranks who write weekly letters to a newspaper's editor are, ipso facto, its longest-running subscribers - except, perhaps, the cranks themselves. Maybe I've just answered my own question there.

Actually, if you came back 24 hours later, it wouldn't even to see responses to your own comment (since nobody can see it during that period): it would be purely to see if other people commented.

What a sad, sad prospect. I certainly hope the blogosphere never goes there.

I think he means that comments are disabled 24 hours after the post goes live.

I don't.

>1. A fixed commenting period for each post of 24 hours. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

>2. Until the period expires, none of the comments would be visible to other commenters. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Seems pretty clear to me that for 24-hour period following a post, comments can be made, but are invisible. After 24 hours, comments are made visible, but can no longer be made.

#5 on the blog makes this more clear - #1-#5 really explain this concept.

As an aside, I hate the idea. :shrug:

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