I decided long ago that I would not have comments or any user contributed material on my blog. I’ve had good reasons, but mostly it was to prevent idiots from screwing up what I had to say. The reality of the internet is that there really isn’t a conversation going on, just the illusion of a conversation created from hundreds of millions of little micro-marketers all yelling to get attention.
Lately though I’ve been thinking of my reasons for not having comments, and how I might go about bringing good discussions. My two main reasons for not having comments are:
Suck Blog Rule #1: Bloggers with large commenting followers will progressively write shittier posts as the comments become better than the author’s own writing.
I’ve noticed this on many blogs (and other sites) and I can imagine it’d be difficult for me to avoid it. The temptation to just write something semi-controversial and then let the comments support the site is too much. The temptation is also present to just half-ass the blog post, and then respond to any criticism or compensate in the comments.
Without comments, I’m forced to write something more insightful and take my time on it, because I can’t defend myself after the fact without writing another blog post. It simply keeps me honest as a writer.
Suck Blog Rule #2: The quality of the comments is proportional to the difficulty plus the identity requirements to post.
As it gets more difficult to post, and you have to identify more, the quality of what you say increases. This seems like a given, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t understand this. At first they want to let everyone post and have their say. The author doesn’t want to censor since censorship is bad. Then one day you’re Rusty Foster and you shut down new users because someone posts a NSFW pic featuring your wife.
After that comes the censorship, and by then it’s just too late. Smarter bloggers start right off with the censorship and high levels of identification to post. Usually those blogs have fewer comments, but generally better comments. For the very large blogs it’s probably nearly impossible to fully police the comments, so I’ve got no idea what they do.
Probably some “social media” con gets sold on the commenters to police themselves, but then I think you’ve just stepped into “forum” territory rather than “blog”.
In general, I want people to take the effort to respond to my posts with their own blog posts or an email. They should put a name and identity to what they say. However, today I started contemplating how I could solve the problem of comments on my blog with a bit of tech I got lying around.
I have a project I’ve been tinkering on for a while called Son Of Sam. Don’t worry, you can’t find it on this site anymore since I’ve done the revamp, but all you need to know is it’s a pure Python email server that lets you write SMTP client/server apps the way you’d write a web application. I wrote it, and then I didn’t really have anything to do with it, so I just let it sit there. It works great, assuming I could use it on something.
The main advantage of Son of Sam is that you can code complex state based logic in plain old python and do up fairly sophisticated email applications. Here’s an example: You know how with MailMan you have to subscribe to a mailing list? Sure you can configure it to not subscribe, but then you’re just making a spam festival. Well, with SoS I’ve done a mailing list that let’s you just send an email to subscribe. How it works is when it detects that you’ve just sent your first post, it stores it, and then sends you back an email asking you to reply to join. If you reply, then it subscribes you and posts your original email to the list. It then would just shoot you a link to a web page to fill out more information if you cared.
It’s simple things like this ability to easily subscribe people to a mailing list with a multi-stage handshake that are easy to do in SoS, but a bitch to do in other email systems.
Alright, so I have nothing to use SoS on, and so that’s a dangerous situation because then I go around inventing random “problems” to work on. Like, not having comments on my blog.
Well dammit, I want to use SoS for something, so why not try doing a “mailing list” for my blog, but with a twist.
Imagine a mailing list that was connected to each blog post, where you could discuss the blog post on a kind of “micro list” about just that post. Let’s say I say something like this:
“Dammit, baby seals are fucking tasty, especially in BBQ sauce.” — Zed A. Shaw
Obviously you agree or disagree with this position, so at the top of the blog post are two email links:
Yes, I’ve registered those domains. Now, the domains are just to identify where people stand on the issue of the blog post, people would get emails from both domains, but now everyone knows that they are for or against. Mostly because I think that’s a cool idea. Right, it’s cool so shut up.
Obviously, it’d be annoying as hell if you had to do the subscribe handshake each time, so the first time you send an email to any address at either oppugn.us or impugn.us the SoS server would know this and make you identify. Identify will be covered later, but after you’ve replied and done your handshake, you are now known to the whole site (not just that micro-list) and you can freely talk on any future topics.
After that, you talk with everyone else and debate intelligently, or not, depends on the post I guess. However, there’s some rules I’d want to add to make things interesting:
Obviously I’d also have spam filtering and such, but that’s all very easy to add.
The general goal with this is to prevent the dumbass who just posts a one-liner and then runs off. It also turns it into a game for debate, and when the debate is done due to lack of participation, the discussion shuts down and it doesn’t need to be managed anymore.
However, there’s one missing piece: the anonymous asshole.
You know, I don’t think I could stop anonymous jerks from saying crap, but I could probably make it just difficult enough so that I’d at least attract the more intelligent and creative anonymous jerks. But how to do that?
What if, whenever you post (any time) the SoS server validates your email address with the following rules:
The goal here is to only include the real true believers in the internet. People who went out and spent the $5-$15 dollars to register a domain in their name, put their name on it, make an email address, and at least put up one web page. Doesn’t matter what they call the domain, what their name is, and what’s on the page. All that matters is that they went through the effort to make this and are following their country’s (very lax) laws to identify themselves for the domain.
If this is done for every post (or a random sample of them) then you could seriously cut down on the number of anonymous jerk wads posting. Combine that with the effort required to participate (posting every day, saying something original, content length) and you could create a very cool game.
Why not also require a PGP key? Those are kind of a mother fucker to setup and maintain, but it’d be very sweet if the system could encrypt all the messages to people who participate.
Why stop at blogs? I think an email system like this could just be a cool game by itself.
Maybe allow other domains to participate, so you could have your blog on my system through a subdomain.
The discussion could be posted to the blog post through simple Ajax HTML calls to static files that get generated by the server from SoS. No need to run special software on the server, just a bit of javascript and some raw HTML. My twitter comments are done this way and it’s very easy.
Overall, it’s a cool idea, and as school winds down I may just hack it up and try it out. If you have comments, feel free to send them to me.
