Hello Thought Shrapnel readers! Some of you have asked over the last few months why the ability to comment on posts is switched off here.
Well, that’s mainly because I noticed a general downwards trend in the quality of online comments. For example, people would share their opinions on my blog posts without reading more than the title, or just link to their own stuff. And then there’s the perennial problem of spam.
This week I’m going to run an experiment and leave comments open. Everything I post from today to the end of the week you’ll be able to comment on directly.
I like the approach that Dan Meyer takes on his blog with adding ‘featured comments’ to his posts after the fact. I may try that.
Let’s see how it goes…
Image by clement127 used under a Creative Commons license
jamie allen
25 September 2018 — 09:10
Yeah, agree, plenty of upside to featured comments
john
26 September 2018 — 20:36
Replied to Experimenting with turning on comments for a week (Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel)I noticed a general downwards trend in the quality of online comments.
Hi Doug,
Glad to see this. There has a been consistent drift to twitter & other social for comments. I think this is a pity for several reasons.
I am responding to this with a webmention, which it looks like you have adopted. I’d hope that the quality of comments received via webmention might be better given that the comments will be published on the commenter’s own site. These might be less knee-jerk or throwaway than a tweet or toot?
There are still a few wrinkles to be ironed out of webmentions but I have high hopes that they will be more widly adopted and be a good thing. Like this:Like Loading…
Aaron Davis
27 September 2018 — 01:50
I agree with John in the hope that the quality of replies from webmentions might be better. My concern with comments is that we are stuck in the past with what constitutes a ‘comment’. The only way to improve that is to write our own future one comment at a time.