Please read the comments
blog.codinghorror.com
blog.codinghorror.com
If you find reading other people's comments fulfilling (either on your own site or on sites that you visit), that's awesome.
I tend not to read comments on any site that has them. I consider sites like HN which exist solely for comments an exception. If I had a blog, I certainly wouldn't let other people comment on it. I suppose this means there's a chance I might miss out on some really enlightening comment that someone makes. Based on ~20 years of reading comments on the internet, I'm willing to take that chance.
It might just be my innate negative reaction to someone telling people what to do, but listening to someone make bullshit blanket statements about how you should spend your time pisses me off (although at least he said "please").
It is definitely optional, comments are like annotations to the article.
Counterpoint: sometimes I skip to the HN comments before reading the linked URL to see if there are any major problems / concerns / flaws in the article. Kind of conceptually the same way people use Amazon user reviews when determining if they want to buy a product or not. Crowdsourcing credibility..
The manufacturer (writer) tells one story, the consumers (readers) may tell another. If you want the bigger picture, it is nice to consider both. But you're right that a well written article should stand on its own, the comments shouldn't be necessary to complete the article.
Of course, the irony of me writing this on HN does not escape me, but in this case, I think we write the actual content.
I have comments on my blog. I'd never consider removing them for all but the most touchy of subjects. Yes, sometimes people say things I don't agree with. Welcome to the real world.
I do moderate my comments (100% pre-moderated, because I hate captcha and yet also hate spam) but I don't get enough comments to actually make that a burden. I also don't moderate out anything that's not pure obvious spam (though to be fair, my posts don't usually cover anything terribly controversial either).
My blog is my place on the internet. A place that represents me and a place that I control. If a reader wants to add a comment to the discussion, that's great but do it at your own place. But my place is for my stuff, and I plan to keep it that way.
I do like thoughtful feedback, and I also think additional information contributed by third parties can sometimes be useful to append to the end of an essay, if it has clarifications/corrections/etc. So my half-way approach has been to explicitly note at the bottom of each page that comments are welcome by email, and then, if I do receive useful emails, I'll update with the newly received information. For example, the bottom of http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html has short pointers to two things sent in by readers, which they presumably would have left as a comment, if I had comments.
I suspect that different people have different motives, which is why we see so many different philosophies on comments (mine, FWIW, is here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/commenting-on-comm... ).
In addition, some blogs are popular enough to become quasi communities and some aren't. My blog is the latter though I wouldn't mind if it were the former, and it serves a variety of purposes; solidifying and sharing my thoughts are two but not the only two.
By refusing to listen to commentary that disagrees with you?
I think Tumblr has it right when it comes to blog commenting: to reply to someone's post, you don't leave a comment on their blog; you make a "reblog" post on your own blog, which quotes their post and responds to it, and the fact that this happened is automatically propagated back to them.
The original post stays on the author's blog. The reply stays on the replier's blog. If the original author replies to the reply, though, then that appears on the author's blog, too, with the replier's post quoted for context.
In other words: it's called hypertext, folks.
Tumblr's model is absolutely awful, though, because it conflates likes, plain reblogs and reblogs that actually add commentary together (and sometimes doesn't even note all of the latter?) into a single stream of "notes", making it basically impossible to trace or even find the actual conversations and commentary from all the noise. Their quote inlining can be terribly confusing at times too. I honestly wonder how anyone manages to discuss anything on the site.
There's an assumption that both Tumblr and Twitter make: if two people want to have a back-and-forth conversation, they'll mutually follow one-another, so that their replies to one-another will show up naturally in their feeds. And if they aren't following one-another, that must mean they want to basically ignore one-another.
Isn't HN actually an example of what he's talking about? I thought HN is moderated. People vote, they can down vote comments out of existence. The community does, or at least used to, self moderate. Telling people who are being uncivil to cut it out.
I'm pretty happy Discourse is trying to help solve this issue. I guess the test would be to use it on a site that gets controversial comments, say FeministFrequency.com, and see if it fairs any better.
Of course his point though isn't that Discourse will solve the issue, only that it's a step. He says you need moderation if you want good comments. Is that wrong? How is that any different than having a bouncer at a bar or security guard at a lecture that will escort out anyone who is being a jerk.
Personally I appreciate comments on most of the sites I read. I see some headline, I check the comments for support, reactions, and for alternative ideas. That works for me on HN, on Ars, it even works enough of the time on Slashdot and Reddit.
I agree with him. If your site's comments are full of bile you're doing it wrong. Delete the bile. If you're a big site hire someone to delete the bile. Consider things like Joel did (and maybe Jeff does the same thing?) where when he marks a comment as deleted it's actually just hidden for everyone but the commenter. That way the commenter thinks his snarky comment is still there oblivious that no one else is actually seeing it.
That's just one example. I'm sure Jeff and Discourse have many others.
I don't really get why discourse (apparently) does so much work to show 40 comments. I guess it might work fine on a fast enough machine, but I at least think I'd rather wait a few hundred extra milliseconds at the beginning and not have things clunking into place the whole time I'm looking through the comments.
(one true way: http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ )
hmmm ... we are serving our topic pages in 83ms median in 6 hours I can count 4 times it took us a second to serve a topic page. This is across MANY sites.
so I am sorry going to have to call bullshit on perf issues caused by server perf. Server perf is fine.
Client perf can improve and we are constantly working on improving it.
That said:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/
First view 3.255 Repeat view 2.075
Is pretty good, and it is actually faster than that when navigating between pages.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_K8_MJF/
I realize they are different systems with different goals (and different users and...), but the spare interface here does come with some benefits.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_55_XPN/
just sayin...
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar...
To me, it seems simplistic and woefully inaccurate to characterize all internet communities with comments as sufficiently similar to even consider either approach as a blanket dogma.
This (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) is a very good essay that illustrates my point.
Please read the comments... because i have just spent a lot of time on a new product that is entirely focussed around comments.
I'll tell you this: Discourse is a zillion times better at making my admin / moderation tasks easier than the TypePad commenting tools it came from.
You are not alone it seems.
(If someone knows where I can find discourse-installations except for the sandbox, post a link please)
I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are some great insights to be found out there. Not everyone has enough insight to write an entire fresh blog post, or maybe someone's blog post was the spark needed to light the thoughts.
It's like saying we shouldn't eat potatoes and carrots because they grow in the dirt and the dirt is gross and nasty. Missing out on smart comments, extra contributions, corrections or anything related to the article because a mean person said some bad words that made you feel bad is pretty immature.
Sometimes people are being told by hundreds of other people to "go hang yourself"; "put your face in a toaster"; "get raped"; and so on. Sometimes the threats are from a few people but more direct. "I know where you live and I'm going to rape you".
Please don't underestimate the volume or unpleasantness of modern online trolling. People find it significantly stressful, and some people die as a result of it.
I would turn off comments for any blog I had, but include some kind of email address. This would increase the amount of junk in my inbox but reduce the amount of useless pointless crap (which is what most Internet comments are).
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jai...
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/twitter-trolls-jailed-o...
http://spyhollywood.com/charlotte-dawson-australian-televisi...
With a few exceptions, websites no longer attract a high enough percentage of the smart, articulate, responsible commenters to make a comments section worthwhile.
The best discussions now happen on forums and aggregators like Slashdot, HN, subreddits, etc., or via competing blog posts promoted on social media. Corrections and related links work well on Twitter.
The way I see it, is anonymity itself is the problem. I don't bother reading comments anywhere, because the chance of me being "enlightened" is slim to none. I have no idea who is posting, or if what they are posting is true, or who they are. I'm more likely to get quality reading out of books on specific topics I want to learn. Comments are just a waste of time. I think HN is the one place left which still has decent comments.
And yet, you've offered ideas here that I may not have considered on my own. I find value in that regardless of whether I ultimately agree, disagree, or choose not to consider it further.
HN has a variety of comments, some excellent, some mindless, but most effectively anonymous. So I don't think I can agree that anonymity is the problem.
Perhaps the problem is accountability. HN (and really, any comments section that is still worthwhile) has methods for punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior. Or maybe we are simply lucky enough to be small enough to not be that interesting to trolls.
At least my experience is that some of the most thoughtless and intolerant people are the same who will happily post using Facebook login, full name etc.
It seems we have a non-sandbox discourse installation linked to the article.
Which makes me happy.