Wandering Thoughts archives

A thought on trackbacks

One corollary to different views on what comments are for that has struck me is different views on how desirable and useful trackbacks are.

To wit: if you feel that comments are a conversation, trackbacks are an annoying distraction; they are an attempt to pull people away from the conversation to another site (or page). However, if comments are a collection of reactions, trackbacks are clearly desirable; they aggregate the reactions on other sites into one place.

My personal view is that I am most interested in comments as a conversation, and so I don't find plain trackbacks very useful as they're usually done. They could be useful if the blog author exercised some sort of editorial oversight on what trackbacks showed up, putting up only the ones that they felt added something interesting to the overall reactions, but I suspect that exercising this level of selection would make at least some blog authors uncomfortable; it'd feel sort of like moderating your comments and only letting through the 'useful' ones.

(My attitude on trackbacks is ambivalent; I like the information for my own use, but I'm not sure I'd display trackback results on WanderingThoughts even if I had the feature implemented.)

Different reasons for having comments

Sparked by comments on a recent entry, it occurs to me that there are at least two cultural views of what comments on a blog are there for:

• comments as a conversation on or sparked by the original entry.
• comments as a convenient central place where people can put their reactions and replies to the entry.

(There are undoubtedly other views that I'm not thinking of.)

I clearly tend to think of comments as the former, not the latter, but the latter is a perfectly sensible thing too and, the more I think about it, the more I think that there are a bunch of forces pushing comments towards it. For example, if you get enough comments and enough people replying to each other, the original author's part of the conversation will probably be basically drowned out.

(Also, there is an obvious tradeoff for the author between writing more comments and writing more actual entries, especially as entries will probably have more visibility.)

This will colour your desire to have comments at all, too. If you feel that comments are for a discussion forum (or you fear that the comments will turn into one no matter what you do), you may well not want to spend your resources to provide one for people.

When I do and don't read a blog's comments

I read (or sometimes skim) a relatively decent number of blogs, and as someone who writes one too I wind up noticing various aspects of the experience. One of the things I've noticed is that I am both quite predictable and quite divided about reading comments on entries; there are some blogs where I always read the comments and there are a lot where I never do, but there are almost none where I sometimes read them and sometimes don't.

In thinking about this, I think that there are two determining factors. One is whether or not the comments 'add value'; whether they are interesting, informative, amusing, and whatnot. The other is whether or not the comments are a conversation, where the original author also comments; if the original author doesn't reply to comments, what you have is just a stream of reactions to the entry, and if I wanted that I would trawl the blogosphere in general.

(Partly my bias is because I find most comments to be less well done than actual blog entries, which is not really surprising, all things considered; I feel that most comment writing environments are not that conducive to good writing. It's sort of like dashing off a first draft email message, usually under time pressure, with a bad editor to boot.)

Another way to put this is that if I wanted to read other people's writing in general, I would be reading their blogs. Thus, if all the blog's author does with comments is give other people a convenient forum, I'm pretty much not interested.

(The exception that proves the rule is if the original entry asks a question that I'm interested in; then the comments hopefully provide a convenient collection of answers.)

PS: none of this should be taken to imply that I don't read comments on WanderingThoughts. That's a different situation; I am always interested in people's reactions to my own entries.