I didn't know I cared

[dsrtao]

I just unsubscribed from an RSS feed of a blog that I frequently enjoy. Why? Because I wanted to make a comment, went to the blog, and discovered that the author had decided to turn off commenting. This strikes me as so antithetical to my conception of what a blog is -- a microcommunity -- that I felt disgusted, and stopped reading.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

In a commentless blog, no one can hear you flounce!

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

What would be your term for a "blog" without commentary?

[dsrtao]

No, I'm just a drop in the bucket, who is responsible for my own actions.

[dsrtao]

Newspaper columnist?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It's my face, and I'll spite if I want to?

if you were enjoying the posts, is it worth giving that up or can you just change your mental model? I imagine there are columnists that you enjoy without that same opportunity for immediate feedback (short of emailing them).

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Do you read columnists even though commenting to them can't be done easily?

[dsrtao]

It's worth it to me to stop reading him. One of his major topics is building community, and I now feel that he is hypocritical at best.

[dsrtao]

Not any more. If the platform on which they publish supports commenting, then I expect that to be turned on. Online newspapers generally do.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think that's a pretty strong reaction. There are plenty of places on the internet where comments are ubiquitous and of a remarkably low quality. It seems a reasonable choice to not want your pages clogged with them, albeit a choice you wouldn't agree with. You read plenty of other non-interactive writing, why say that this author's form of distribution is invalid?

Personally, I think comments on blogs are a net good, but I think they work best when the community of commenters is, well, a community, rather than whatever strangers wander by; so LJ, where posts are usually read and commented on by people in your network, feels communal, but things like popular authors' feeds tend to be jammed with stuff neither you nor the author care about.

(I see from another comment this author actually wrote about building communities. I don't know that not having comments then makes him a hypocrite, but I can see why it would seem less in keeping with what he would be wise to do.)

[dsrtao]

I agree it's a strong reaction -- I add and drop blogs all the time, and I've never before felt that it was worth mentioning in public.

I thought that this person had a public conversation, but I was disappointed to discover that it was a different sort of thing -- essays, not conversations.

I have now expended enough energy on this discussion that I could have written a letter to him in the first place, so I think I shall.

[kayshapero]

Good idea - you may find that he was being spammed or something. Or he may find that he didn't think this through.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I honestly disagree -- while I find blogs much more *interesting* if they allow comments (and even moreso if they really grok the community idea), I don't think they're nearly as central to the idea as you seem to. I think you're being a bit LJ-parochial here: comments are *way* less central to most blogs than they are to LJ. Indeed, I'd say that it's unusual, on average, for bloggers on non-LJ systems to curate their community with any care.

In this particular case I can understand the charge of hypocrisy -- at the least, it sounds like this guy doesn't understand community as well as he thinks. But in the general case I don't have a fundamental problem with a comment-free blog: I simply take it into account when deciding whether or not to bother following it.

(Heck, even on LJ my feelings vary from person to person. There are people for whom I always read their comment threads, because they foster particularly interesting conversations, and others who never seem to get very interesting responses but whose posts are well worth reading, so I just don't bother to follow the comments...)