[NathanKP]

I feel that comments on blogs themselves are slowly being replaced by comments on sites such as HN, Reddit, etc. I notice again and again, at least with personal blogs, that a post with 90 comments on HN will only have two or three comments on the post on the original site. Additionally the posts on HN are more likely to be negative than the posts on the original site.

Perhaps it is because people feel less inhibited when they are posting their thoughts in another neutral space. If the author of the article doesn't want to be trolled or flamed on his own site then why not just link to the HN discussion, as I have seen other bloggers do?

If your post is controversial or interesting people will discuss it, and you can do nothing to stop it, because closing comments on the main site will just cause people to discuss it on another site, as this HN post is proving.

[jacquesm]

I've done more or less what you suggest, I have comments 'off' on my blog but do follow the comments on the HN threads. I used to post whatever I had to say as a 'link less post' but people were complaining about reading light gray on dark gray.

I think that those that disagree with you are your best teachers though, what would you rather have, a hundred people going 'yes' or 3 that disagree with you and get a conversation going?

[Ardit20]

"Additionally the posts on HN are more likely to be negative"

What exactly do you mean? That people do not comment on here, ohh this is brilliant, we love you, you're our god, even if the guy said something obvious or something which isn't brilliant at all, or do you mean that here people write down their thoughts as they are not biased. I do not see why the latter would necessarily mean negative however? There are criticisms, but are reasonable criticisms something negative?

I think posts here are positive, even for the owner of the site, unless he takes it personally. You know, its just business :P

[NathanKP]

I am just referring to a general trend that I have noticed in submitted articles, after comparing HN comments with on-site comments for the past year or so.

On HN you are more likely to see nitpicks or deconstructions of the article, even criticisms of the person who wrote the article. Also the best way to get upvotes is often to criticize the article submitted and point out a flaw.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing... I'm just sharing my observations.

[_delirium]

That makes some sense to me, and I think I'm somewhat more negative on 3rd-party comment sites than on bloggers' own sites as well. On a blogger's site, it feels like I'm writing a reply to the blogger, which I make more effort to try to keep constructive, soften negative points, make sure to balance them with positive ones, etc. On a 3rd-party site it feels like I'm writing a comment for the site's own community, not really directed at the author, who often isn't present (e.g. I doubt NYTimes journalists are here reading our comments on their articles).

The fact that they are sometimes present makes that a little tricky, and maybe requires recalibration. Traditionally, I was able to assume that an author of an external blog post wasn't part of the community, because if they were, they would've just posted their post in the community instead. For example, in the heydey of Kuro5hin, if you were part of the community, you most often subumitted your articles to K5. If something was linked externally instead of published on K5, you could assume it probably wasn't by a community member. Same on Usenet--- if you were writing an article as part of a community, you posted it to the community. And I think it does make sense for discussions to have a different tone when the author is present and engaging versus when they aren't.

It's a separate (though related) issue, but I think there are real advantages to that kind of community-centric site, where the discussion and the articles make up the community, instead of the HN-style collection of on-site discussion and off-site blog posts, some of which are by community members and some of which aren't (with no easy way of distinguishing, unless you remember which URLs are blogs of HN members).

[superk]

I think he means "the posts on HN are more likely to be _critical_"