Blog Comments
As noted before on this site, the idea that blogs are going to be the great political debating forum of the future is rather undermined by the fact that comments boxes -- a major part of most blogs -- become pretty useless once you reach a certain number of visitors.This site luckily has only around 10 readers, who all tend to play nicely in the comments box. There are no plans for that number to increase. However a good example is the excellent Harry's Place, which over the last few months has suffered from trolls using a number of aliases to clog up the comments' boxes (for example 'Benjamin'), and from self-appointed comments-box's Guardian Angels who try to 'expose' them (for example 'Mark D'). In fact sadly sometimes they now approach the unreadable, despite the valiant efforts of the site's management.
So what can be done?
1. Don't have comments' boxes. This seems a practical solution for sites that are more 'Look at me -- this is what I think' than sites that encourage political debate, but even for the former it means less feedback and encouragement.
2. Have comments but with a delay. This stops trolls but requires a lot of work on the part of the site owner and rather slows down debates.
3. Have comments but police them. See no. 2.
4. Have a system where you need some sort of password to post comments. This obviously strops trolls, but it does rather ruin the spontaneity of the site, and requires losts of admin.
5. Make the site less controversial. It is well know that the easiest way to get lots of blog traffic is to say something outrageous, and if it's very right-wing it helps even more. Ditto the number of comments you get. But this rather ruins the point of having the site.
6. Er...are there any others?
Update: My numbering of the points was rather wacky. I've corrected it now.
posted by Matthew @ 3/30/2004 11:53:00 AM
Comments: 0
