February 12, 2006
A Blog Is Still a Blog Without Comments
Comments can improve a blog, create a community, and give readers a convenient place to respond. They can also produce spam, moderation work, server costs, and an endless supply of people convinced that your website is public property. None of this determines whether the site is a blog.
There is an old argument in blogging that returns every few years, usually because somebody with a popular site closes the comments and another person announces that the site is no longer a real blog. Apparently, the definition of a blog depends not on publishing, chronology, permanent links, or an identifiable author, but on whether strangers have a small box beneath each article where they can explain why the author is wrong.
I do not agree. A blog with comments is a blog. A blog without comments is also a blog. Comments are part of the publishing system, not the definition of the medium. A radio program does not stop being a radio program because it refuses to put callers on the air, and a newspaper column does not become something else because readers cannot attach their opinions directly beneath the final paragraph. The presence of feedback may change the experience, sometimes considerably, but it does not transform the underlying format into another species.
In my own 2001 attempt to define a weblog, I described comments as something a publishing system may provide, depending on the blogger’s policy. The essential characteristics were chronological publishing, individual entries, permanent links, and an author with something to say. Comments were useful, but optional, in the same category as categories, trackbacks, and the other machinery that accumulated around blogs as the medium evolved.
A blog needs an author, not an audience participation form
A blog needs someone willing to publish. That is the minimum. The author may enable comments, moderate them, close them after a week, allow them only on certain posts, or decide that life already contains enough unpaid administrative work. None of those choices makes the writing more or less blog-like.
Comments can improve an article. A reader may identify an error, add useful context, provide a better example, or contribute experience the author does not have. Some comment sections become small communities with their own relationships and knowledge. When that happens, they can be more valuable than the original post, which is wonderful for everyone except perhaps the author’s ego.
But comments are not automatically valuable merely because they exist. Many popular blogs publish articles that receive five variations of “great post,” three unrelated questions, two insults, and a gentleman offering excellent prices on pharmaceutical products. Technically, this is engagement. Technically, falling down a staircase is also movement.
The usefulness of comments depends on the subject, the readership, the scale of the site, and the amount of work the author is prepared to do. A technical tutorial may benefit enormously from corrections and alternative solutions. A short personal note may not require a public hearing. Some posts invite discussion. Others simply contain something the author wanted to publish.
There is no reason every entry must support the same interaction model. The idea that comments must be enabled everywhere is mostly inherited from blogging software, where a checkbox became a cultural obligation.
The hidden cost of the comment box
People often describe comments as though they were free. The author publishes a post, readers respond, and a beautiful conversation emerges without maintenance, infrastructure, spam, moderation, or anyone calling somebody else a fascist over the correct way to prepare coffee. That has not been my experience.
A heavily visited blog can receive an enormous number of comments, many of which need to be read, filtered, approved, corrected, or deleted. Spam consumes server resources and requires increasingly elaborate defenses. Trolls test the moderation policy with the dedication of quality assurance engineers, although without the useful bug reports. Readers demand explanations when their comments disappear, then submit new comments explaining that moderation is censorship.
At some point, the comment system becomes another product. It has users, abuse cases, performance problems, policies, and support requests. The difference is that nobody is paying for this product, and its most enthusiastic customers occasionally hate you.
That does not mean comments should always be closed. It means the decision has a cost, and the person paying that cost should be allowed to decide whether the benefit justifies it. Telling a blogger that comments are mandatory is easy when somebody else maintains the database, reads the insults, clears the spam queue, and spends Sunday afternoon investigating why the anti-spam plugin has consumed the server.
Why people comment
Some time ago, I ran a small experiment on this blog. I removed the website and email fields from the comment form to see whether participation changed when commenters could no longer attach a promotional link to their names. During that week, the number of comments dropped sharply, particularly among familiar local bloggers.
This was not a controlled scientific study. It was one short experiment on one blog, and it did not prove that everyone commenting was motivated by self-promotion. It did suggest that the link was part of the incentive for more people than I had expected.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that exchange. A reader contributes something useful and receives a small amount of visibility through their name and website. Early blogging grew through links, recommendations, blogrolls, trackbacks, and people discovering one another in comment sections. Linking was part of the culture.
The problem begins when the contribution exists only to obtain the link. “Excellent article, I completely agree” followed by a website selling insurance is not a conversation. It is an advertisement wearing a small hat.
Popular blogs naturally attract people who want access to their audience. Some do it thoughtfully, adding a real argument and linking to a longer response. Others leave comments designed to appear relevant while quietly parking their URL in a busy place. Removing the link does not eliminate valuable discussion, but it reveals how much supposed discussion depended on the possibility of being seen.
The conversation does not belong under my post
One argument against closing comments is that blogs are supposed to create a distributed conversation. According to this view, disabling the comment box sends the web backward because readers can no longer respond. I think this confuses convenience with distribution.
A comment section is centralized. The entire discussion lives beneath my article, on my server, under my moderation rules. I can edit it, close it, delete it, lose it during a migration, or decide that everyone discussing the article must provide an email address and identify several traffic lights before being allowed to speak.
A genuinely distributed conversation happens when you publish your response in your own space and link to mine. You control your text. I cannot moderate it, shorten it, close the thread, or remove it because I dislike your argument. Your response remains part of your body of work instead of becoming comment number 73 beneath mine.
In 2006, we followed these conversations through links, trackbacks, pingbacks, search engines, Technorati, aggregators, and services such as Digg. Dave Winer and many other early bloggers held long-running conversations without maintaining conventional comment sections. One person published, another responded on a different blog, and links connected the pieces. The discussion was harder to contain, but that was precisely the point. The surrounding debate in 2006 included arguments both for and against comments, including posts from Tecnorantes, Enrique Dans, and ProBlogger.
That model requires more effort than writing three sentences in somebody else’s form. You need a place to publish, a position worth developing, and enough commitment to place the response under your own name. Curiously, these requirements also remove a large amount of noise.
Closing comments is not censorship
Some people describe bloggers without comments as arrogant. The assumption is that an author who closes comments cannot tolerate disagreement, does not care what readers think, or wishes to speak from a golden balcony while the public waits below.
Sometimes that may be true. The internet contains enough people to support every possible diagnosis.
But closing a comment section is not censorship. Nobody has prevented you from speaking. You can write on your own blog, publish in a forum, send an email, discuss the article elsewhere, or print your response on a banner and fly it over my house. What you cannot demand is the right to publish inside someone else’s website. Freedom of expression does not include an automatic content-management account on every domain you visit.
The anger often comes from losing access to the audience attached to the original post. Publishing a rebuttal on a small personal blog may attract fewer readers than placing it directly beneath a popular article. That is understandable, but it is not the author’s obligation to provide distribution for every response.
In fact, publishing the reply independently can produce a better argument. A proper post allows room for context, links, examples, and revision. The person responding becomes responsible for the complete statement rather than dropping a sentence into somebody else’s house and leaving the owner to clean up the party.
Comments are useful when they serve the post
None of this means comments are bad. They are useful when the author wants a local discussion, has the time to maintain it, and believes the readers will add something worthwhile. They make sense for communities, support sites, collaborative projects, tutorials, and subjects where direct feedback improves the material.
They are less useful when every post becomes a moderation queue, the same arguments repeat indefinitely, or most participation is spam and self-promotion. A comment system should justify its existence like any other feature. It should not remain active merely because the software installed it by default.
The sensible approach is to choose according to the purpose of the site. Enable comments when they improve the work. Close them when they create more maintenance than value. Open them selectively when some topics benefit from discussion and others do not. Publish an email address if private feedback is enough.
There is no universal rule because blogs are not universal products. A personal diary, a technical publication, a company blog, and a political community may share the same publishing format while requiring completely different relationships with their readers.
I eventually closed them
When I originally wrote this in 2006, I had already considered closing the comments many times. Six years later, I finally did it.
By 2012, this blog had accumulated roughly 50,000 comments. I had read almost all of them, maintained the systems around them, moderated disputes, removed spam, and watched much of the public conversation move to Twitter, Facebook, forums, and other platforms. At that point, the cost no longer made sense for me, so I published My Blog No Longer Has Comments and turned them off. The blog remained a blog.
Readers could still contact me, write responses, criticize my articles, or discuss them elsewhere. The only thing that disappeared was the requirement that every conversation happen directly beneath my text, inside a system I had to operate. That is the important distinction. A blog without comments is not a blog without readers, feedback, disagreement, or conversation. It is only a blog without a comment form. The writing remains. The links remain. The author remains. Everything else is a feature.