CROWDCTRL

Lately I’ve grown increasingly tiresome of comments on the sites I frequent. When I do travel past the article to read what others are saying, I find myself throwing up in my mouth a bit.

Comments almost always pay lip service to the author, usually in the same verbiage as you’d see in a high school yearbook. I wouldn’t be surprised to find secret MySpace accounts (Croft4eva! or ScrivP!mpin) where these designers solicit so many fanboy comments for their blogs.

When the comments differ from the point made in the article, it’s usually backed up with less truth or forethought than an argument for or against the ability of monkeys to write semantic markup.

Speaking of Jeff Croft (his comment on that, not him as a monkey), I stirred the debate a bit yesterday once I read the comments on a recent post of his. I had been thinking about comments since I redesigned, and have been wondering whether to include them on this site or not.

And it wasn’t only Jeff’s site that has helped convince me to not add them. The results can be varied, but all over the internet the line gets pretty blurry between spam and actual comments.

It gets worse if you attract any amount of attention on digg or slashdot, as Jeff Croft himself found with a recent digg of lawrence.com:

Digg may look different than Slashdot, but the quality of commentary is ever bit as lame.

Comments require heavy moderation or complex systems to prevent spam, and even more attention to moderate the amount of off-topic crap that can clog up and ruin a good post.

On the other hand, comments help facilitate some good discussion around the topic at hand. Feedback is always great to receive, and comments can provide alternative views, criticism, or praise for the writer. And the open forum comments provide helps to create a community around a site, driving traffic and increasing your reach. Those are things I’d love to promote here for sure.

And discussion boards are one of the hottest draws of the internet. Whole online communities are built around this ability to converse and interact with fellows in your same situation, and people on those sites put up with the same issues I’m whining about.

The question is, do I want to build a community around my blog? And are there alternatives to the feedback, discussion and praise that comments bring?

I’m not so sure I’m aiming to make this site a design community. I’m just building a place to express some views and share ideas. Not to give everyone else a place to do that. It’s kindof a selfish thing really. This is my place.

And for alternatives, I’m thinking a good place for contact information will facilitate the many members of my fanclub who want to shower me with praise, or people who want to disagree with me privately.

I do find a lot of value from my web stats, provided by Mint and a few Peppers. I can see who’s linking to me and what they’re saying about the topics I’m discussing. Jeff’s recent response to my kool-aid comment and John Gruber’s recent blurb about the size of webpages are good examples of how other writers can respond to topics on their own sites and provide value to their readers as well.

Other stats from services like Technorati and Delicious / Magnolia let me know who’s linking to me or bookmarking my pages. And Feedburner lets me know who’s subscribing to my feed and what they’re clicking on.

To me these are good enough replacements for the few small advantages commenting would bring. At least for now, I’m content with that. And I’m certainly not ready for the added headache and responsibility that opening my content doors would bring.

I’m not alone on that, either. Jason Kottke allows comments only rarely, Signal vs. Noise has been discussing the topic for a while and openly moderates or restricts comments, and others are outright disabling them, most recent of which being Simon Collison.

So, no comments here. What do you think? (ha! you can’t tell me!)