Curiouser and Curiouser! on comments

Radio Userland comment spam begins?

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 11:54:50 +0000

Is this:

GOOD website for ours!Thank you very much! human growth hormone 3/6/04; 7:31:54 PM

the start of automated spamming of Radio Userland comments? This morning I notice two of them on very old posts of mine from nearly 2 years ago. This would be very bad news as Userland offer no tools for managing comments.

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:15:06 +0100

In BlogTalk 2.0 Thomas & crew have, once again, brought together a lot of interesting people & wherever possible conversations are flourishing as evidenced by tonights get together. It was good to meet Phil again after a year and to meet Mikel for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for K-Collector. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving.

I had the pleasure of dining with Paolo, Mark Bernstein, Stephanie Hendrick, and Therese Örnberg. Mark gave a very interesting keynote this morning which provoked lots of questions for me. Stephanie & Therese gave, I think, the most stylish presentation of the day (including an amusing near-death audioblog to end) and their discussion of presence and spaces was stimulating. From my perspective a happy coincidence that we all ended up together. We had an interesting discussion about a range of topics spanning language, blogging, literary discourse, topics, flame wars, comments & trackbacks, software tools and how you build them, tinderbox, Dave Allen, and test first development.

Taking antibiotics means I cannot drink alchohol so my opinions whilst maybe better formed were far less robust than usual & I was open to colonization ;-) I got persuaded that comments are bad and that even trackback requires considerable architectural revision to work properly. Mark's suggestion of making trackback default to being private (i.e. you get a file of trackbacks and you decide what, if anything, to do with them) seems to be a good one. I think this can be assisted by some sort of intelligent filtering of trackback contents & authorship to help you decide about those you do & don't want to handle. I think emulating the LinkedIn FOAFOAFOAFOAF network model could be useful in this regard.

Also, based on comments by Stephanie and Mark, I have finally concluded that I must do something in K-Collector for the Lilia's and Jim McGee's of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) liveTopics. I think that part of my problem has been misunderstanding where they are coming from. liveTopics, for me, was a stepping stone towards a larger vision which, at that time, I couldn't achieve. But for them it was actually what they were looking for. No wonder then that I've had a hard time convincing them that K-Collector is better.

I haven't quite worked out the answer yet but I think it may be as simple as offering some kind of discriminator where you can choose whether K-Collector should default to showing you only your own work, or the work of the community as a whole. We may even have enough smarts in the database to do this without requiring additional work but I'll have to get some clear space (i.e. after STES) to think this through properly.

Do it in your own backyard

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 20:07:50 +0100

I thought it would be useful for me to jot down some of my thoughts about dropping comments & trackback while I can still remember them. I used to think that comments & trackbacks as they exist in todays weblogs were a good idea. Mark's keynote at BlogTalk 2.0 and our subsequent conversations have converted me to his way of thinking.

Here is my best anology (so far) for understanding the situation as it is today:

Imagine that you really don't like me. One evening you get mad at me and drive over to my house where you daub the message "Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my walls for everyone to see.

The next day I start in horror on seeing this and spend the morning cleaning it off. You may not have signed your work which is lucky for you because I spend the afternoon driving round town with my paintball gun looking to get even. After you've done this a few times I get the message and protect my walls so that nobody can write on them.

But you're not done yet. Since you can't deface my walls any more you go around the neighbourhood painting your message on other peoples walls whether they agree with your message or not. There's not much I can do about it, I probably can't even help them scrub their own walls. The neighbourhood becomes divided over the issue and heated and pointless arguments break out all around.

Note that you haven't daubed your own walls with your message of hate. I think it would be very different if that was what you had to do. I think the inevitable consequence of that would be that you would have to learn to be more moderate or people would stop coming by.

Our comments form part of the overall picture of what sort of person we seem to be. But our comments are dispersed over the many sites we visit. One here, one there, dotted about. Even though they may bear our name the association is made weaker by their not being collected under it and taken together.

If all our comments appeared in one place (our blog) we couldn't so easily escape from them. They would take their place as part of our whole online persona. Anyone whose blog consisted entirely of vitriol and hatred would probably end up ostrasized. But it would be our choice.

Note that I'm not talking about restricting free speech. If people wanted to go visit such sites and read what was said there, that's fine. Even if it's about me. If people think something is fair comment, they can quote it just like always. But the point is that it's in their back yard, not in mine (nor spread - unwittingly - around the neighbourhood) and that they have to take action to do so. Unfair and unsupported comment will stay where it belongs, hung around the neck of it's author.

Commenting on the comments

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 09:39:37 +0100

I have had a couple of comments to my last post on comments. I accept the points raised but wanted to point out that what I describe in that post is only 1 dimension of what is wrong with comments/trackbacks today. There are at least two more. I just wanted to get that analogy down while I could think of it.

The problems with comments/trackback are soluable and, through these solutions, I believe we would end up with a better infrastructure for the blogosphere than the one we have now.

Commentless

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:38:39 +0100

I'm still interested in comments and alternatives to comments. Via Dave Winer, I read that Seth Godin doesn't have comments on his blog because he doesn't want to end up writing for his commenters. I'm still looking for the right alternative.