I have no hopes to convince anyone of my point that may or may not surface in this post, but heck this is my blog home, and here I am right! Or welcome to be told how I am wrong, Just visit, ok?
So I came across this post — er newsletter thing by a Matthew Guay titles “What we lost when we lost comments – Comments require commitment, but they’re worth it.” And I land in agreement with the call to come back to our blog homes, to stop spending all day harking at the social media malls.
You can have a blog without comments, it’ll just be a bit of a lonelier place. You can have a newsletter without comments and with replies, it just won’t turn into an organic, reader-led community. Comments in both instances let you turn your writing into the glue that brings people together, and keeps them around long after they showed up. Who knows, they might enjoy talking to each other enough that you fade into the background, as your writing morphs into something that takes on a life of its own, and the community together grows into something you could have never imagined?
Maybe not, but it’s impossible to know without pulling the conversations back into your own space.
https://buttondown.com/blog/why-enable-comments
But hold the bus Matthew, who lost comments around here? I’ve had them on and keep them on since I started in 2003, despite wading through the spam. I don’t agree with his assertion that the problem was the WordPress platforms inability to handle being slashdotted- cmon the scourage of comment spam is squarely laid at the Google feet, for their creating the monetary incentive to get links inserted into web sites.
And I am seeing now the effects of LLMs now in the toolbelt of comment spammers, who are now hitting me daily with “comments” that are definitely generated from my blog posts, but with the tell tale link that has no relevance at all. Often the email address is “support@someaicrapvventure.com
But I am weird in that I rather get some joy out of weeding out the spam roaches, and taking note of how much better they are getting but still bearing the smell of spam. I know that’s not for everyone, and most people will just closed down the comment box. I do not criticize you if you were forced to but up the steel wall. I just feel sad.
Yet.
When I get to the end of an interesting post and have something to say, I feel sad when what I find at the bottom is…. a closed door. Alas.
So the annoyance problem of comments, which I do not pretend of huge, led folks to turn off, and push their links to social media. The problem there is now the conversations are severed from the content. But even worse, as I now randomly peer into the mega mall that LinkedIn now is especially for the educator community, is that many have forsaken their own homes and pour their writing into the mall.
It’s sickening to see people who’s blogs I relished reading with most recent post dates slipping back and back in time, who regularly are giving it all away at the LinkedIn outlet mall.
There’s a genuine gift to the fewer comments that I see here, still here, still happening
And also, I am cheered to know that decades later that Lachance the comment blogger is still at his craft, and that we had a conversation in the comment space of someone else’s blog.
So as long as I run this thing, despite the stream of sludge that flows in via comments, I am pledged to blocking the crap and keeping the front porch open here, feel free to drop by and leave a note. Because the real comments are worth much muc more then their weight in Like counts.
Indeed true to his word in 2006 Jeff Atwood’s stance is mine too A Blog Without Comments Is Not a Blog. Drop by the porch and tell me how stupid I am or wrong and call me out. That’s what th eporch is for, it’s here at my blog home, and I will gladly visit your porch too.
If you even have one.
Featured Image: I can’t even remember how these dogs got on my old porch in Styrawberry, I think I was dogsitting, or some where neighbor dogs. That’s how porches work. Three Dogs and a Porch flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
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You have to comment on a blog post about commenting, right? It is in the blogging rulebook 🙂 I have been pretty lucky overall with comments on the bava, but it is still like living on old Route 66 watching everyone migrate to the new Instagram interstate 🙂 One of the things I have been noticing recently is I get pretty good comments from bots that are often trying to link back to their AI startup. Some of them are pretty good, and I almost want to keep them for my ego, but in the end I have to just say no. I have been thinking recently that most folks who comment these days are friends and family, and I think that points back to the intimacy of my blog. It is really about sharing my story, just like you do. So, I am happy to comment here every 20th post just so you know I love you.
But the other piece of your post that interested me was the front porch idea. I wrote about it in my post on “Hard Rain Falling” that Tess mentioned the idea of the front porch being engineered out of homes in Fahrenheit 451, noting that it was Bradbury commentary on the loss of community and the personal relations born out of that. This is definitely a larger issue and it maps pretty well on top of the political moment in the US—it seems harder and harder to engage one another on a friendly, personal level. In fact, Trump goes out of his way to alienate any and all neighbors—suggesting their is an insidious logic to this method. Maybe they are all just aliens trying to force us to SLEEP, OBEY, and SUBMIT. So, with every comment a real human leaves on a blog is another nail in the coffin of alien colonization rooted in the logic of fascism.
I think I have broke the code, I am going to leave another comment somewhere else as soon as possible. Oh wait, no one blogs anymore 🙂
You of all people know and honor the blog rules! Last of the bloghicans still at it.
I have been seeing those same style comments, it opens with maybe 2 sentences that pull directly from the post. Sometimes they then add a non related link to some web site, but lately they just leave the link in the url field. The comments are often too smooth, there ius that AI veneer you can see when you glance sideways. I was thiking this is the last burst of seeking SEO juice before Google makes all results LLM-icious. I enjoy the detecting.
But indeed ther glory of the bava is that you not only garner tha comments but they come back for more, its the conversation. You and that other Canadian blogger, Brian… .his last name is some kind of animal, I think.
I love the connecting to Tess’s comment, that is some insight to be proud of. I have to say I have no real experience of that kind of porch growing up in the Baltimore burbs, but our backyards were like that, we always roamed across from yard to yard as there were no fences. But in a way the idea of the porch came round from your analogy of the domain being a Richard Scary house with different rooms.
I’m alll for driving more human nails via comments, I’ll be coming around the bava for sure.
NOBODY blogs like …..
And like that, another AISpamCrapComment on this vintage 2016 post (so old I needed to refresh my memory):
I can smell the GenAI right away. It’s toooooo on the smooth chatty summary, too polished, the staccato rhythm. It’s an obvious summary but you can tell it is the voice of some cold vector who never sat in a real 1970s car.
Keep serving them up, I’ll keep swatting them down.
It’s a whole new job, detecting the replicant comments 🙂
Whenever I see the engagement you get from your comments section, it does occasionally make me miss mine. Yesterday, I got spam messages from my email newsletter (the Field Journal) for the first time. I had shut down the TiHE Slack channel, as getting rid of spammers had become where I spent more time than the few people who would sometimes post there. On Mastodon, the vast majority of people who ever follow me there are accounts with zero posts, less than a few followers, and are following thousands of people (with a questionable profile).
I’m not sure what my point here is… grateful for you and for this place to engage and to learn from others. And it’s good for me to hear you deal with stuff like that, too, but ultimately still find it worth it.
I take comfort in being not very famous, so am not quite the target. I do need to say more clearly, that whay works for me and my strategy is in no way a universal approach. We all have to find our own levels of what we can/want to do, so my way is never The Way for anyone else.
And also, if anything, the load of the undesirable stuff to tend with does not abate (me ringing at the impact of the current PHP exploits).
No insert the quote about a desire to have nice things.
Those PHP exploits seem to be doing a number on all of us. To some degree. Sigh. Also, I just read your other post and now all I can think about is garlic biscuits.