October 15, 2007

The Art of Commenting

After my WordPress commentary front-paged Digg last week, I received a flurry of comments from readers chiming in to express their thoughts on the post. I was reading heated discussions on the content of the post Thursday and Friday, and it was interesting to see the responses.

Outside of the post, however, I made some readers angry because I don't allow comments on my blog. The fact of the matter is, I turn off comments not because I can't take criticism: I enjoy and appreciate intelligent criticism, and I plug my e-mail with such frequency for that reason. My problem with traditional comments is that so many people don't take time to think about what they say before they write them.

Human Nature and Emotion

I believe that with any readerbases come criticism. Having one thousand people agree with you on a topic may result in another thousand who might disagree with you, and within that group you are almost 100% guaranteed to have a few people who believe you are a bumbling idiot-- because they disagree with what you wrote. This was particularly present in the Digg comments last week.

It is totally normal to have feelings of contempt for an author if a commenter disagrees with the author's thoughts after reading- it's human nature, and something I've done myself in the past. That doesn't necessarily make these people stupid: a commenter might be a very intelligent person capable of writing a mature argument, but after reading something they staunchly disagree with, there's a chance they could be too clouded by their emotions to think clearly.

...and so we get to my problem with the comment form. The comment form forces you to express your thoughts as soon as you're done reading, which you should simply never do. You don't get the freedom to draft your comment and save it for later- you have to write it immediately, while your page is open, or whatever you wanted to say is going to disappear from that tiny form. Sure, the intelligent reader can resist the urge, maybe e-mail the author if he has a lot to say, but the problem lies in the thousands of e-citizens who simply don't have the will to let the emotions drain and come back to reply later.

The Digg-front-paging of my WordPress commentary is a perfect example of both these ideas. If you read through the comments, you'll see many people who contributed maturely and respectfully agreed or disagreed with me, but you'll also find dozens of people who outright disagree with my opinions, some of whom I imagine didn't get past the Templates section before they made remarks about my writing style, arguments, or age.

Keeping It In Draft

My inbox, on the other hand, had none of those things. Though reading through the positive responses I did have a crowd of WordPress supporters, those who did argue for WordPress did so intelligently, and without resorting to name-calling. Similarly, many of those who wrote in agreeing with me backed up their opinions with valid evidence, something you don't see as often in a comment form.

That's because, the way I see it, e-mail is a completely different paradigm for reader-to-author feedback than commenting. When you sit down at your e-mail, be it a web or desktop client, you're sort of pushed into the mood to think harder about what you want to say to the recipient. You're not dealing with some skimpy comment form- you're sending a letter like you'd send to any of your contacts, so you want to make sure it looks good and reads well. You have the freedom to come back and keep working on it later. Obviously, no one acts this way for every e-mail they send, but similar to conventional letters, when expressing our opinions we like to put more thought into what we write before we send it.

Writing For Yourself

At risk of overusing his thoughts in my posts, John Gruber talked back in January about why Daring Fireball is comment-free, though for reasons different than my own:

I wanted to write a site for someone it's meant for. That reader I write for is a second version of me. I'm writing for him. He's interested in the exact same things I'm interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he's read it all.

If I turn comments on, that goes away. It's not that I don't like sites with comments on, but when you read a site with comments it automatically puts you, the reader, in a defensive mode where you're saying, "what's good in this comment thread? What can I skim?"

It's totally egotistical. I want Daring Fireball to be a site that you can't skim if you're in the target audience for it. You say, "Oh, a new article from John. I need to read it," and your deadlines go whizzing by because you have to read what I wrote.

If I turn comments on I feel like it's two different directions. You get to the end of my article and you're like, "let's see if there's anything interesting. Let's see if there's any names I know." That's really it. Sometimes a design decision is what you don't put in, as opposed to what you put in.