This entry takes no comments. No trackbacks, shoutbacks, pings or dings. It exists on its own, just like all the others I've written, residing entirely within its own context. Whether it's read by anybody or not, it is as real as a tree falling in the woods, and it's certainly more searchable, indexable and Googleable than one of those. What this is not, however, is interactive.
I can't find an authoritative history of website comments anywhere, but I recall seeing feedback solicitations on blog entries as far back as 1999. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to write. "Hey, good job?" "I really agree with what you're saying?" "Me too?" If I disagreed with whatever theory was being posited, I could always post something myself somewhere and reference it via a newfangled "hyperlink." Written opinions have been traded in similar cross-referenced fashion for centuries.
But as the new century began, it was clear that people wanted the ability to elicit responses that were not only instant, but inline and attached. In my life as a developer, I was being asked to build not only blogs, but comment submission forms as well. In a relational database, this is roughly what the relationship between the two looks like.
This clearly drawn host-parasite pairing has guided my view of the practice for many years now. A posted comment -- usually anonymous, generally either overwhelmingly positive or negative -- sits alongside, sucking precious disk space and visitor attention away from the original work. Deleting vulgar and offensive comments, to say nothing of link-spam, takes time and is generally agitating for all actual humans involved.
Alas, but this is the way blogs are today, and how the blogosphere has decided they're going to be. Something that had begun as an innocent poke into the unknown ("Is anybody out there?") blossomed into a crusade for self-serving personal validation. Lots of comments, either measured by positive tone or sheer volume, are what bloggers generally want. Comments mean you're getting through to people, jerking their knees.
As old media and big media slowly caught up with the new, they added feedback features of their own. ESPN.com, the biggest sports site in the world, has its own "conversation" feature that allows registered users to quickly open up a text box at the end of a column, type their instant reaction, then let it fly. I've never read a single one of the comments that are attached to my columns over there, much less jumped into that fray with the "article author" posting function I hear they have.
When I started The Mid-Majority back in 2004, the commenting feature was left on. A month went by (nothing says "irrelevant" quite like "Comments (0)") but when the idea caught fire and the throngs gathered, people started throwing around their opinions. After a few days of "you're great," "you suck," and "check out my site" personal adverts, I shut the form down. Forever.
But it's important to keep the door open, to allow people to get in touch, especially if you get your facts wrong and you need to post a correction. I learned this the hard way in the third season of TMM (2006-07), when I took down my e-mail link and left no way for strangers to contact me. I was able to get a ton of work done in my safe little teflon-walled cocoon, but I had to learn about my screwups from message boards. And I didn't make any new friends via the site that year.
So now I have a feedback form that spits out all the day's responses once a day into my e-mail, and I've reached a point where just about 80 percent of it is thoughtful responses and serious inquiries. I think what I've learned from this is to maintain accessibility, but to make it difficult. Unless you're one of the millions of bloggers who gets high off the cheap fuel of strangers' attention, protect your real e-mail address. While you're at it, turn off your Facebook wall and all other insta-feedback mechanisms that invite the kind of asinine drivel bored people tend to crap out. Make folks work for that contact form.
There is a distinct inverse ratio between the speed at which visitors can provide feedback and the quality thereof. Besides, the less time one has to weed through polarized and useless feedback, all the more to spend responding to the good stuff.
