Comments used to be the backbone of the blogging community. I found your post and left a comment, then you came to my blog and commented on a post of mine.
And so it went on.
Comments are an awesome way to interact, and they can be a goldmine for both you and the reader.
- The reader can ask questions, or seek further clarification about the content.
- You can find out what people really want to know, and provide more help in future.
But not all blogs agree that comments are a good idea.
Copyblogger, that font of information on all things content marketing, decided to remove comments on their blog posts back in March (see here for their post). Instead, people who wish to comment on a post are encouraged to reply to them on Google + or Twitter.
They’ve defended their decision by saying that social media allows comments to be conducted in a wider social arena beyond the confines of the blog itself;
You get to have the same great conversations you were having in your blog comments — but now, they take place where a wider potential audience can see them.”
They’ve also said that some of the comments posted on their posts have been so insightful that they’d rather the commenter had posted the response on their own blog, linking back to the original post.
Now, I can see their point, but Deb Ng posted this response on her Kommein blog. If I’m honest, I think I agree more with Deb than Copyblogger – comments are where you get to have conversations with people.
True, I’m only one blogger in a crowd of thousands, and I don’t get the kind of traffic that Copyblogger get, but still – I don’t blog just to sell things, I blog because I like telling stories, and I like sharing things I’m interested in.
Comments can be more valuable than social media interaction.
Getting comments on the content is valuable because it lets me know not only that someone read the post, but also that they felt strongly enough about it to leave me a comment. Sure it’s nice to have people share my links on Facebook or do re-tweets on Twitter, but it’s only by getting a comment that you know the content was read.
And if you’ve spent a couple of hours crafting a blog post full of photos and stories that you hope someone will enjoy, you do hope it’ll get read.
There are a couple of blogs I’ve stopped reading because they not only ask me to go elsewhere to post my comment, they also ask me to sign up for a separate forum where people can have discussions based on the posts. (Although Dan James’ A Big Creative Yes has at least replaced this forum with Google +)
Problem is, the discussions end up being conducted by readers, and not the original writer of the post. It’s as if the blogger is saying “here are my ideas, now go and talk about them amongst yourselves but for God’s sake don’t bother me with them.”
I also don’t want yet another set of login details to remember (and, er, Heartbleed, anyone?). I love being able to comment then and there on someone’s blog – I don’t have the patience with jumping through extra hoops before I’m allowed to post my response.
Copyblogger raise the issue of spam but I use Akismet and so far only non-spam has gotten through – so I’m not going to close comments to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sure, I get the occasional person trying to post a link to their blog in a ham-fisted way but I just trash it. It happens so infrequently that it’s not even worth bothering about. I guess when you get to the size of Copyblogger that’s a real problem, but for me, it’s not even an issue.
So I will continue to allow comments on my blog, as long as they’re not a thinly veiled attempt at providing irrelevant back links to someone else’s blog, and I will continue to encourage and enjoy discussion with anyone who wants to join the conversation!
I suppose if you’re blogging to sell things, you don’t want open comments where people can complain about shoddy products and/or service. But the rest of us? As I occasionally add to a tweet, “RTs appreciated, comments cherished.”
I don’t like separate commenting systems like IntenseDebate (I sometimes refer to it as IntenselyHate) because they don’t always work and often (as you mentioned) want you to set up Yet Another Account. I’m not even all that find of the Blogger option to re-route comments to G+. And just about everyone hates captcha.
Personally, I’ve always tried to leave my blog as open as possible to comments. I moderate posts over a week old, since most spam is directed at older posts (where they assume you won’t go looking), and I can delete spam in recent posts. If it gets out of hand, which has happened on occasion, I’ll disable comments on that one post.
Yeah, I often find most spam goes onto posts from weeks ago, but now I’m on WordPress, it asks me to approve comments from people who have never commented before – that’s if Akismet hasn’t already caught it.
One solution would seem to be combining social media and the comments. Attempts have so far been poor as FB comments on blogs have proven very unpopular, and the G+ comments on the blog seem to break conversations apart.
I imagine a new product that invisibly bridges comments on a blog with one or several social media, sharing the conversation across networks seamlessly. It’s a bit of work, but workable. Perhaps this is a product I should be looking into developing.
I suppose my biggest problem with having conversations all over the place means that if three people are discussing the post on Twitter, and four others are on Google +, then there’s a chance the two discussions will never intersect – that’s why I like having comments on the blog itself because it means you don’t have cross-platform issues. However if you could come up with a product that would do that, then it would be brilliant!
There are blogs that force to use G+ to comment and if I’m signed in, I might, but otherwise I probably won’t. So, no. It’s too much extra work to comment.
That’s the thing, not everyone has a G+ account so it seems silly to stop them from commenting if they don’t want one.
I agree on the keeping comments open. My blogger tends to be very good at catching spam and even if it doesn’t those pesky comments are so rare and far between anyway.
As Sonia said, there are some that force you to use G+ and I think that’s a blogger initiative. I know I can toggle it on or off if I so wish, but, to me, it makes my blog far less personal. I don’t think G+ is great on the social front and so I’d rather keep my comments directly on my blog. The trouble with that, too, is that you can’t police spam so easily and, if you change your mind about having G+ as your comment tool, it disappears all of the responses that you did have. It also hides your old comment form responses when you have the G+ option on.
It might have been nicer for them to have created a melding of the two.
I think I just worry that if you have different conversations going on in different places, then it’s not as simple to follow as having all of the comments in one place on a blog post.