The Changing Face of Comments


It’s been over six years that I’ve been writing on Technosailor.com. It has gone through many evolutions of themes, plugin uses, writing styles, writers, etc. The latest, if you haven’t noticed, was a move to subdomain technosailor.com as technosailor.com in an effort to rebrand under my name.

In the last two years, this site has become less abouot frequent writing and more about in depth writing. Most of the articles you have seen in the last two years have been solid articles that are well-written and in the 500-1000 word range.

Photo by wickked on Flickr

It’s become less of a blog and more of a column that you might see in a journal or newspaper. That is by design as it adds to the authority of this site. During this time, I have toyed with turning off comments completely which would certainly remove this site from the blog category. I’d actually be okay with that since I do blog in other spots. This site does not need to be a blog as that is only a word.

I find it interesting today that John Gruber of Daring Fireball happens to be talking about this issue (again…. it happens enough). A lot of people don’t like John. But no one can argue that the hard work he has put into his site over the years is something that he doesn’t have to share with anyone else.

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

The reality is most of my “conversation” happens elsewhere. Most of the time, reader engagement with my content comes in the form of retweets and not comments. And when I do get comments, they tend to be distracting. Who really needs that?

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.

Indeed. Look no farther than the comments on any article on TechCrunch.

In short, I’m about to do what I should have done months ago. Maybe not immediately. It might take a few weeks before I pull the trigger. But I’ll be shutting off comments here. Of course, I have blogs elsewhere with comments, but sometimes not as focused as here on Technosailor.com. For instance, my personal blog is aaronbrazell.com and my mobile blog is at technosailor.wordpress.com. Comments will stay open there.