One site owner's view on comments

http://pando.com/2014/08/19/comment-sections-are-on-their-way-out/

Authored by: Bryan Goldberg.

Bryan is an entrepreneur in New York and San Francisco. He is the Founder and CEO of Bustle.com. He previously founded Bleacher Report, and currently advises several startups.

Major achievements, but it does not mean that he's correct on commenting systems.

No one method exists for managing user-contributed comments, especially with comments.

I have no problem with sites that prohibit comments. Nothing exists that says sites must permit user-contributed comment. It's a big web. Users can comment by other means, like with their own blog sites.

I take some exceptions with Bryan's views about comments.

... time has shown that comment sections often create a negative space and provide a negative experience — to the reader, the writer, and to the publisher.

Incorrect. Comment sections provide the experience mentioned above if a site owner permits it. You reap what you invest into the site. Like Anil Dash said, if your site has assholes, it's the site owner's fault. Quit blaming comments or user-contributed content. It's a lazy, unimaginative excuse.

If you don't want to permit comments, then simply say that managing comments in way that we like takes too much innovation and time, and we feel that energy is best used on other aspects of our site. Twitter can be the web's message board.

Because several others writers have discussed the issue of comment abuse and bullying in great detail, I won’t elaborate on this primary reason for avoiding them.

Again, it's the site-owner's fault. The blame does not go to the trolls because that's all they know. Site owners need to take more responsibility. Disabling comments is certainly a viable solution, but commenting systems don't receive the blame.

Both the ongoing struggles at Gawker, and the stunning attacks on Zelda Williams serve as heart-wrenching pictures of trolling.

The latter has to do with Twitter, which is a completely different animal, in my opinion. You cannot lump Twitter's functionality in with message boards or the comment sections in blogs and newspaper sites.

Simply stated — the real estate traditionally devoted to comments is too valuable to be wasted on a component that adds minimal value. This slot is typically found directly below an article’s body text and, on Bustle, it is now used primarily for “related content”.

Well who said that comments must be displayed on the same page as the article content? Not that I expect comments (WebMentions) here at JotHut, but replies to an article will appear on a separate page. At the bottom of an article is a link to the replies, and the link shows the count of replies. A user must click the link to see the comments. What's difficult about implementing that?

The shift to hosting “related content” underneath an article has taken place over a two or three year period of time, and it was catalyzed by two major events — both of which were advanced by companies like Outbrian and Taboola.

Uh, what? I implemented the related content links at the bottom of a ToledoTalk.com thread post when I created the Parula code back in 2005. The related content is based upon similar tags in the articles. I found the code on the web. It's hardly a new concept.