A Commenter's Rights | Hacker News Reader

A Commenter's Rights

blog.disqus.net

13 pointsdnaquin7 comments

Are you kidding me?

Look, I know that this makes marketing sense for Disqus. "A commenters rights: to post their comments on a system like Disqus!"

But, as co-proprietor of a fairly popular blog (for the space we're in), this seems exactly ass backwards to me. Blogging isn't about making 1000 little Slashdots. If your comments mean that much to you, they shouldn't be comments.

Get a blog.

Don't get me wrong. I love comments. The comments on our blog are very often better than our blog posts. I LOVE our commenters. But the market solves this problem nicely. People also read us for the comments. We have every incentive to publish every non-spam comment, and that is in fact our policy.

If you want rights, if you want archival access to your work, if you want an edit workflow, what you want is your own blog, and you should have one: more people should be blogging.

Note also: Hacker News fails some of these proposed tests.

I'd add that the publisher should have a syndication option for the comments. In other words, the publisher should get a non-exclusive, free right to syndicate all the comments along with the original blog post. A conversation and the corresponding blog post should always be able to go hand in hand.

Yet this is part of the conversation about that post but it's happening outside the blog. People will discuss a blog post wherever they want, and every conversation will be different. I'd rather discuss a Techcrunch post here than on Techcrunch, for example.

Someone posted an article about this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203575

Awwww, did you by any chance just take a shotgun and blast away half of your foot? You seem to be forgetting something - it's not the users responsible for the adoption of disqus, it's the blog owners. Disqus may have many users, but your ONLY customers are the hundreds of blogs using the system.

Including me.

What you just did there is that you told your customers - you are not important, we care about your end users. You are running a B2B shop and you suddenly announce that you are doing things to serve the C that comes after the B. You care about the customers of the business you serve, and not your actual customers. That makes me unhappy, disqus. I want you to want to please ME, because I'm sticking your commenting system on MY blog. I don't want you to bother about pleasing all the other people. If you wish to go ahead with pleasing the blog readers and fucking over the blog owners who installed you, then go ahead.

But excluding me.

In what way does this hurt blog owners?

It shows that disqus wants to keep the comments separate. What do I do when disqus suddenly puts ads on my blog? Or disqus suddenly decides that my blog does not meet their filter because I'm too controversial?

They yank my comments. From that blogpost, their attitude is - we and the comment makers own the comments. You blog owner are nothing in this equation.

That's pretty arrogant.

When it comes to comments, I agree with Joel: comments off, get your own blog to create your own voice.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/07/20.html

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