Tommy Collison

There’s been a good bit of debate recently with regards to whether blog comments are a good idea or not. John Gruber, Marco Arment and, most recently, Matt Gemmell have all made good points in favor of turning comments off entirely.

Of course, I recognize that the blogs of all of the above are more-frequented and of a higher standard (and standing) than my own little corner of the internet, but their discussion has got me thinking.

I’ve decided to turn off comments on the blog here for a little while. My reasoning:

1. Of all the people out there who visit my blog, I’d wager that less than half of them read to the end of whatever post brought them here. Of that minority, less again will bother to read the comments (or even check if there are any). A tiny minority will take the time to actually leave a comment. In terms of me getting feedback or opinions on my writing, e-mails and Twitter messages (both @replies and DMs) are used much more than comments.

2. Comments create both a burden of moderation and of a timely response on my part.

3. Most crucially, comments allow anonymity. They allow the separation of your persona and your opinions. That’s something you can’t do in real life, and it tends to bring out the very worst in people. I’ve got my fair share of nasty comments on this blog, and each time, I couldn’t trace the author because of the nature of comments. I don’t need to be dealing with that, so this is a big part of turning of comments. It should be no problem for the moderate commenters among you to drop me a quick e-mail or @reply, and it’ll (hopefully) keep out the worst of the vitriol. (The anonymous vitriol, anyway — the rest of it, I don’t mind).

If you want to give me feedback or agree with me or tell me that what I wrote was completely wrong for X, Y and Z reasons, I’m not a difficult person to reach. I’m on e-mail a lot (tommy@collison.ie) and on Twitter (@tommycollison) most days too. Better yet, why not write a response on your own site and link me to it?